
Class. 
Book. 



1.L.1 



Copyright N° 



COPYRiGHT DEPOSIT 



WHAT I BELIEVE 
AND WHY 



WHAT I BELIEVE 
AND WHY 



BY 
WILLIAM HAYES WARD 



'* 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1915 



3^ 



Copyright, 1915, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published September, 1915 




SEP 22 1915 

©CI.A410. r )98 
ft C t 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction . . . 3 

CHAPTER 

I. The Data for Belief ... 11 

II. Ether, Matter, and Mind . . 25 

III. Had the Universe a Beginning ? 39 

IV. The Stellar Universe — Had It 

a Cause ? 48 

V. The Atomic Constitution of the 

Universe 61 

VI. The Puzzle of the Infinite . 72 

VII. A Universe Fitted for Life . 75 

VIII. The Mystery of Life . . . 81 

IX. Foresight in Evolution . . 97 

X. Nature's Preparation for Man 114 

XI. Reason and Soul 128 

XII. The Problem of Instinct . . 137 

V 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XIII. The Direct Vision of God . . 152 

XIV. How to Think of God . . . 164 
XV. Duty and Duties 177 

XVI. Duties Between Man and Man 186 

XVII. Essentials and Non-Essentials 

in Religion 197 

1 

XVIII. The Hebrew Scriptures . . 211 

XIX. The Christian Scriptures . . 232 
XX. The Inspiration of the Scrip- 

TURES 248 

XXI. Jesus the Christ . . . . . 263 

XXII. The Future Life 280 

XXIII. The Essence of Christianity . 301 

XXIV. The Sum of the Whole Matter 321 



WHAT I BELIEVE 
AND WHY 



INTRODUCTION 

AS children we learn by being told. Our be- 
liefs must be taken on the authority of 
parents and teachers. It is only with the 
access of years that reason develops far enough 
so that we seek the basis of accepted beliefs, that 
we confirm them or doubt or disbelieve. Many 
beliefs we have to take all our lives on the testi- 
mony of others. Travellers have told us of the 
city of Timbuktu, and we do not doubt its exist- 
ence. We have seen it in the atlas, and that is 
enough. A hardy explorer has reached, or says 
he has, the South Pole, and we do not, or cannot, 
prove or disbelieve his claim, but we accept it. 
A multitude of other beliefs our own observation 
or reason confirms, and some it denies. 

Not all our beliefs accepted from parents or 
teachers can we easily test in any concrete way 
with eyes and ears. They are beliefs or opinions 
relating to matters of political wisdom, of social 
welfare, of religious creed and duty. These we 
have inherited and are very likely to hold because 
inherited, without seeking to test them. We have 
a prejudice in their favor, and we do not care to 
examine the grounds of our prejudice, or we have 

3 



4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

not time or energy or opportunity to make the 
investigation. We still listen to those who assert 
what we have been taught, and do not think it 
worth while to hear the other side. We may even 
give study to the subject, but only by reading the 
arguments on our own side, that we may strengthen 
our own defenses. Thus a man's mind may in 
early life lose the power of expansion, may be 
anchylosed like the sutures of the skull, so that 
further growth is impossible. 

Yet even if this is not the case, if the mind is 
kept open to new views of truth, it is a fact often 
observed that changes of view come gradually 
and insensibly. The bearings of facts that seemed 
at the time insignificant, or a number of them, 
only after a period of gestation demand atten- 
tion. We find to our surprise that truths we 
thought certain become less certain, perhaps quite 
doubtful. Our attitude on living questions has 
insensibly changed. Socialism does not seem as 
impossible as it did, nor the devil quite as per- 
sonal. And still, in the stress of daily work, we 
do not take the time, or have not the energy, to 
draw a fresh map of our beliefs; or we feel a 
certain hesitancy or fear about charting them, 
because we are comfortable as we are, or not 
uncomfortable, and the definite recognition of a 
change of belief would be disturbing. 

Something like this has been my attitude to- 
ward the great questions of religion ; and yet for 



INTRODUCTION 5 

many years I have felt it my duty, when I could, 
or whether I could or not, to investigate so far 
as I might, the grounds of my beliefs as to God 
and Scripture and Christ and worship and duty. 
In my day, knowledge in science, in philosophy, 
in archaeology, in criticism has made it possible 
to recast the grounds of one's religious belief; 
and even one who, like myself, has not been able 
to give his time professionally to these studies 
will yet have caught the currents and been borne 
on the drift of them, and may be sufficiently 
informed generally, if not critically and at first- 
hand, to be at liberty to make his own judgments 
and draw his own conclusions. This is what I 
have long resolved to do, just for my own satis- 
faction, and, possibly, to bring useful suggestions 
to others who may feel the same desire to orient 
their faith and know what they believe. 

May I be allowed to say that I was fortunate 
in having inherited an interest in religious ques- 
tions? For three generations before me my lin- 
eal ancestors had been New England ministers. 
My father's library was rich in theological works, 
as well as works in philosophy, and these he en- 
couraged me to read in my younger teens, Ed- 
wards, father and son, Hopkins, Bellamy, Em- 
mons, and Dwight, while Calmet's "Dictionary 
of the Bible," and Home's "Introduction" were 
familiar to me. For his day, my father was a 
liberal in theology, not a Unitarian, although his 



6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

library contained, and I read, on both sides the 
discussions of Woods and Ware and Stuart. My 
father was a disciple of the newer theology of 
Emmons and N. W. Taylor, and was an admirer 
of Park in his polemics with Hodge. I was thus 
taught early not to accept an old faith unless it 
was proved true, and yet to be hospitable to new 
truths that might break out of God's holy Word. 
In those days the inspiration of the Scriptures was 
not much questioned, except by "infidels," and 
yet we were beginning to doubt whether the Bible 
was written to teach us science. Hugh Miller and 
Edward Hitchcock were telling us that geology 
might bring us a fresh interpretation of the six 
days of creation. 

I think my first unrecognized doubt as to the 
historical certitude of the Bible came in the three 
years between the ages of six and nine, during 
which my father required me to read the Bible 
through in Hebrew, he being my teacher. He 
believed, I am glad to say, that Hebrew was an 
easier language to learn than Greek or Latin, 
and with three years for each, and in this reverse 
order, he required me to read the whole Bible in 
the original tongues, with the Old Testament also 
in Greek and the New in Hebrew, and both in 
Latin. It was during those years given to He- 
brew, certainly not much later, that I learned 
from my Gesenius's "Lexicon" that Babel in 
Arabic means the gate of God, Bab-Il, and not 



INTRODUCTION 7 

confusion, as the Genesis story tells us. I knew 
that Arabic was allied to Hebrew, and the deriva- 
tion in the Arabic seemed more natural than one 
which came from baled, to confound. The doubt 
did not germinate very much, but it remained, 
and it was somewhat confirmed when I was re- 
quired to read Stuart's "Commentary on Daniel," 
which discussed questions of historicity, not 
wholly after the conservative way. When my 
father taught his older children the Assembly's 
' 'Shorter Catechism," he took great pains, in a 
sort of Sunday evening lectures, to show us why 
the answers were true, and at times why they 
were not true, In this very favorable atmosphere 
of instruction I was taught to keep the sutures 
of the mind open and free, not hastily to take new 
conjectures, but yet hospitable to their considera- 
tion, as was Jonathan Edwards, the great re- 
former of New England theology, one of whose 
resolutions, written in his boyhood, reads: 

I observe that old men seldom have any advantage 
of new discoveries because these are apart from a way 
of thinking they have been so long used to: Resolved, if I 
ever live to years that I will be impartial to hear the rea- 
sons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them if 
rational, how long soever I have been used to another 
way of thinking. 

In this way have I taken the liberty, for which 
perhaps I ought to ask pardon, to give a personal 



8 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

explanation of the occasion for this study, and 
for the personal character of its title, "What I 
Believe and Why," and for the personal element 
which may appear in the following discussions. 
I would not impose my conclusions on the reader, 
but I would suggest to him the reasons for my 
own more or less certain faith. 

If one wishes to know definitely what he be- 
lieves indefinitely, and why he should believe it, 
how shall he begin ? He should purge his mind 
of all prejudice, and even discharge it of all pre- 
conceptions and even beliefs, and begin at the be- 
ginning of his knowledge, at least on all religious 
and even ethical matters, much after the method 
of what is called the Cartesian Doubt, which, in 
philosophy, begins at the very beginning, with 
the recognition only of personal consciousness. 
That is, he should put behind him, for the nonce, 
any impression of belief, or disbelief, in God or 
gods or sacred books, and of obligations or dis- 
tinctions of right and wrong. The first assump- 
tions will be of one's own natural powers, and one's 
own consciousness and one's own perceptions as 
they take hold of the outside world; and he may 
then accept those results of science that are ac- 
cepted by all men of science. Thus the facts of 
chemistry, the geological history of the earth, the 
nature of the solar system and the stars, and all 
the world of vegetable and animal life, with the 
working of human psychology, all these will be 



INTRODUCTION 9 

the basal data for one's conclusions as to religious 
faith. 

For the first question that will come to us is: 
What is the basis for natural theology ? Do we 
believe in a God ? To be sure, theology is a 
very different thing from religion. Religion has 
to do with our duties toward God, or gods, if 
such there be; while theology is the philosophy 
which classifies and supports our beliefs, and be- 
liefs only. Religion has to do with obedient ser- 
vice to a superior Power, and has its object in 
that Being; while theology has its end and ob- 
ject in one's self, in satisfying intellectually one's 
own craving for knowledge. Yet because one 
cannot experience obedience or reverence toward 
God until one has an intellectual and theologic 
belief in God, because belief in God so requires 
religious relations toward Him, therefore we some- 
what loosely call our beliefs, our theology, relig- 
ious, while in fact the mere correct belief in God 
is no more religious in itself than belief in a devil 
or a Chinese dragon or a sea serpent. 

But this anticipates what must come later. 
For the present, we may dismiss Bible and God, 
and ask of nature about us the primary question 
in natural religion : Is there a God ? Later, if 
after going forward and backward we should find 
Him, the related duties will need consideration; 
and after that we may inquire what are the evi- 
dences of revelation, and what its contents, and 



io WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

whether death ends life. For the present we are 
concerned with the data which will give or sug- 
gest a conclusion on the great question of Theism. 
This is more than half the quest. 



CHAPTER I 
THE DATA FOR BELIEF 

I HAVE said that if I want to know truly what 
I ought to believe about religion I must first 
discharge myself of all prepossessions and 
begin at the beginning. That beginning is that 
I must trust the validity of my own consciousness 
of myself. I am, and I am conscious of myself 
in my moods of action and feeling. I, as nomina- 
tive case, subject, objectify myself as objective 
case, object, and I declare me to exist — under 
these moods. I cannot doubt the fact. It is a 
real existence, even if it be called an illusion, a 
dream, for the dream, or illusion, exists, and so 
does whatever may be under that dream or illu- 
sion. I am, I am, I, the substantive I, and I 
cannot but believe in the substantial me. 

Next comes the recognition of the moods under 
which I exist, the thinkings, feelings, doings; the 
sensations, the perceptions. I recognize that as 
a thinking, feeling being I am a continuous mind, 
and also f hat I am, or have a body. By my 
senses I cannot but be convinced that there is 
also something external even to my own body, 
other bodies, animate and inanimate. I appre- 



i2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

hend them by five senses. I am convinced that 
they are not a subjective illusion. To be sure, I 
am familiar with what seem for a moment real 
objects seen, which are illusions, as in dreaming 
and in insanity; but through the concurrence of 
the senses, in the tests of my waking hours, I 
am compelled to believe these persons and things 
not me to be real existences, as real as I am my- 
self. I conclude that I am not the mere spinner 
of unsubstantial dreams, solipsissimus amid the 
vacant spaces which I fill with empty shadows, 
fancying them solid realities. I live and move 
with actual objective persons and things, of which 
I am unus inter pares et impares permultos, one 
among multitudinous differing and separate reali- 
ties. No sane person, not a philosopher, can be- 
lieve everything to be subjective imagination. 

My personal sensations give me the idea of 
time, learned through the succession of sensa- 
tions; and my organs of feeling and sight give 
me the idea of space. I see myself existing in the 
moving current of time, and I see the world about 
me existing in space. My faculties give no limit, 
and they seem to deny any limit, to space and 
time. I cannot imagine a beginning to time or 
a boundary to space, while equally the concep- 
tion of time and space as infinite is beyond my 
comprehension, but the fact is simple and easy to 
understand. Space and time are diverse quid- 
dities. Space is universal and static, static be- 



THE DATA FOR BELIEF 13 

cause universal. It rests because there is nowhere 
to which it can move. It occupies the all. It is 
the great all-comprehensive Brahm in which all 
things exist. Matter may be in it here or there, 
and ether may be in it everywhere, while space 
is the condition of their existence. But time is 
present, passing, new. It was, it will be, it now 
is only in the flux of the moment, for it is of its 
essence to be impermanent. It moves us in its 
vast sweep of current, bearing all things with it. 
So out of that which no longer is time covers 
the whole of absolute space, and moves mightily 
in a great tidal ocean that knows no refluence. 
Space and time cannot be thought away as cate- 
gories of imagination; they are facts, the condi- 
tions of all existence. Everything that is, has 
its limit in space, and is borne along by the 
stream of time. 

I cannot admit any argument against the in- 
finity of time and space, and so against any con- 
clusions as to the existence from all eternity of 
included matter or mind, drawn from any assump- 
tion that beyond our possible knowledge there 
may be transcendent relations of time or space 
such as would vitiate any conclusions one might 
draw from them as we know them. Mathema- 
ticians and philosophers amuse themselves, for 
example, in talking of the Absolute, which has 
no limiting relations, or they fancy space of more 
than the three dimensions which we know as in- 



i 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

eluding all its possible relations. They imagine 
an insect so far flattened down as to have no 
upper and under side, and which, given a mind, 
could have no suspicion that there was any other 
than the two dimensions of length and breadth 
in which it lived; and they then suggest that we 
may be such limited creatures knowing only the 
three dimensions familiar to us, while there may 
be others familiar to higher minds. They tell us 
that by adding a fourth or fifth dimension the 
present relations of space, as known to us, would 
be so changed that any present impossibility 
might become possible, and all knowledge and all 
conclusions annulled. So of time, they conceive 
a Higher Being who "views all things at one view," 
to whom there is no before or after, but only a 
present now, and who thus can know all things 
past and future, because all time is ever present 
to him; and they thus predicate as philosophy 
what the familiar hymn gives as poetry: 

"Eternity, with all its years, 
Stands present in thy view; 
To thee there's nothing old appears. 
Great God, there's nothing new." 

A legitimate figure of speech in poetry cannot so 
easily be transferred to philosophy. When we 
know that time and space are actualities we can- 
not blow them out with a whiff of fancy, as if a 
dream. To explain difficulties by denying the 



THE DATA FOR BELIEF 15 

validity of reason is intellectual suicide — we might 
as well bury all philosophy and suppress at once 
all reason if we are to explain our ignorance by 
the denial of our knowledge. An Absolute which 
is limited neither by time nor space is unthink- 
able to us, and we must think of it as impossible 
to God. Any being however supreme who exists 
must exist in the categories of time and space, 
which are quite as necessary as he is himself. 
To assume and argue otherwise is to be, like 
Milton's devils, "in endless mazes lost." 

Next I begin to examine the not-me. I find 
that about me is the world, and I discover that 
the earth is a part of the solar system, and that 
the sun with its satellites is but one in a vast 
congeries of stars which are numberless suns like 
our own; some of which we know have satellites 
like ours. I then begin to ask what is their his- 
tory, their origin, and their future. 

I see that this earth I live in is a round ball, 
made of less than a hundred elements, and then 
I ask if these discrete elements are really simple, 
indivisible, and essentially permanent, and I am 
informed that they are probably each composed 
of a definite number of subatoms, which may, 
or may not be the ultimate corpuscle or cor- 
puscles. Beyond that I cannot go. I am not 
yet informed whether these subatoms are solid, 
impenetrable ultimates, or are movements, whorls, 
vortices in a primum mobile which physicists call 



1 6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

ether. There I must leave the matter for the 
moment. 

Then I study the earth I live in to learn its 
history. I find it has had a succession of ages, 
that it has possessed successive stages of con- 
tinental development. It was once the scene of 
vast paroxysmal upheavals, under the influence 
of internal forces which have gradually dimin- 
ished in activity. The earth was once much 
hotter than it now is; its oceans boiled, its crust 
was molten, but through numberless eons it has 
cooled and solidified until now it suffers only from 
occasional earthquakes ; and here and there spout 
out from below its volcanic fires. That is, there 
was a time when it was molten, but now it is cool 
and habitable, and this process of cooling is going 
on every day, and the time will come when the 
last internal fire will cease to burn, and the earth 
will be cooled solid to the centre. In the course 
of nature this must be in time, we know not how 
many billions of years hence. 

But, equally, there was the time when it was 
a molten mass, and there must have been a time 
when this condition began to exist, for the sure 
process of refrigeration is not yet completed. 
The fact that at this time the process is not com- 
pleted is proof that the earth has not existed as 
earth from infinite time. It began to exist in 
finite time. 

I turn then to this earth's sister satellites and 



THE DATA FOR BELIEF 17 

to the sun which is their centre. I find that the 
big planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have not yet 
cooled down. They are covered with clouds of 
steamy vapor. The small ones, from Mercury 
to Mars, have cooled down like the earth. But 
the sun has not cooled down. Its immense mass 
has not yet allowed it to become solid. But it is 
giving off heat all the time, and in time its supply 
of heat will be exhausted, whether it comes by 
contraction or by the falling into it of meteorites, 
or from some chemical source, like radium, which 
we know little or nothing of. It must follow the 
example of Jupiter and be surrounded by vapor, 
and later like the earth become solid, rigid, and 
cold. That will happen, under all known phys- 
ical laws, after myriads of eons. But it has not 
happened yet. Therefore the sun has not existed 
as source of light and heat for an infinite series of 
years ; otherwise it would have finished its course 
and become a dead sun. It had its beginning. 

Then I look beyond this solar system. I find 
that this world of ours, the sun with its retinue 
of planets, is but one in the midst of a vast mul- 
titude of similar suns. They are about us, in 
every direction, at vast distances from each other, 
and reaching out one beyond another, distance 
added fathomlessly beyond distance, immeasur- 
able, inconceivable. But we see them crowded in 
a ring that divides our heavens, thickest in the 
ring, and more scattered elsewhere, so that it 



18 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

would seem that this our sun and this our earth 
are proximately, as spaces are measured by light- 
years, somewhere near the centre of a vast ring 
of stars, forming in the total a huge system of 
suns and stars, all in movement, and all, it may 
possibly be, revolving about some common centre 
or centres. We do not know certainly, but we 
know of some that they are moving, and that our 
own system is in swift motion in space. We can 
only conclude that probably they are all in mo- 
tion, even as the planets of our own solar system 
have their common motion. Our little system 
will then be the microcosm of the multitudinous 
macrocosm which astounds our vision with its 
immensity as we gaze at it on a clear night. 

But again we ask : What is its history ? Had it 
a beginning ? Will it have an end ? 

What is true of our sun is true of every sun 
which occupies its place in the starry universe, its 
little space as compared with the incomprehen- 
sible spaciousness of the entire circuit of stars 
whose multitude blurs the Milky Way, and whose 
tens of thousands blaze in the rest of the sky. 

As the sun had its beginning and will cease to 
shine, so each star is giving out its portion of 
heat into space, losing its light, approaching its 
frigid death. Because it has not yet reached its 
grave, it has not existed as a sun from eternity; 
it had its beginning. The stellar universe, at least 
as we know it, is not infinite, it is finite, in time. 



THE DATA FOR BELIEF 19 

And it is not infinite — it is finite, in space. By 
very nice measured observations we discover that 
our sun is moving in space, very swiftly as we 
measure movements on the earth, very slowly as 
we measure stellar time and distance by the space 
through which light will move in a year. Many 
of the stars we know are thus moving, and we 
reasonably presume that they all are moving, and 
in their several paths or orbits, but which are yet 
as fixed and limited as is the circle in which the 
stone moves which a boy swings by a string about 
his head. So far as we can learn the entire uni- 
verse of stars which we see is one system, or pos- 
sibly two systems, limited within its own round 
of revolutions and attractions, and bounded by 
the emptiness of space, the same sort of space 
beyond it. Whether beyond this stellar complex 
of moving stars there exist yet other stellar sys- 
tems like this which entrances our vision, we do 
not know. But, so far as we can learn, our uni- 
verse, all, anywhere in total space that we know 
to exist, is not infinite; it is limited. It is just 
as truly limited as "the visual line that girts us 
round," and which the ignorant yokel deems "the 
world's extreme." The space about our system 
of stars we must think of as boundless, infinite. 
Within our limited universe we see enormous 
empty light-year spaces, and then outside this 
universe exists a further reach on every side of 
empty space, yet where there may exist, beyond 



2o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

our power to discover them, other distant systems 
occupying their space in the void where place is 
not, such systems as astronomers used to guess 
they had discovered in nebulae. They may be 
there, hidden by some failure of light to penetrate 
the distance. It is possible, but we have no evi- 
dence that such is the fact. At all events, our 
universe, and any other like it, is finite in space 
as in time. 

The question whether the stellar universe had 
a beginning, and is thus finite in time, requires 
some further consideration. Our solar system has 
a brilliant central sun, and non-luminous planets 
which would be quite invisible from the nearest 
star. We know that some of the nearer stars 
have dark planets revolving around them; they 
are variable stars, hundreds of them. Can it be 
only the planets, no bigger than Jupiter, that have 
cooled down, so as to lose their visibility ; and are 
the visible stars all large, and are they all the large 
stars there are ? If so, they are all of about the 
same age, came into being at about the same time, 
in a vast yet limited backward view of time; and 
we can then have a conception of the beginning 
of our present-known universe. But we have no 
reason for believing that such is the case. There 
may equally as well be larger stars that have lost 
their heat, and are therefore invisible; and if so 
there may be multitudes of them. For aught we 
know, and it is quite probable, the number of 



THE DATA FOR BELIEF 21 

dark, cold, invisible stars may be many times the 
number of the visible stars. If such is the case, 
it throws the time of the beginning of our stellar 
system uncounted eons back to the time when 
the oldest and deadest of all the dark stars began 
to emit light. 

That there are such dark, invisible stars we 
have evidence in the sudden outbreak in the 
heavens of a new star, where no star, or a very 
faint star, was visible before. The only reason- 
able explanation of such a phenomenon yet given 
is that of a collision between two stars. Attrac- 
tion has somehow brought them together, and 
the collision bursts them into intense heat. They 
will be blown into fragments, mostly into gaseous 
vapor, continue for a while in violent combustion, 
and gradually sink into a state of comparatively 
quiet heat, and lose much of their temporary splen- 
dor, and may even, if small enough, cease to be 
visible at all. Where they shone out for a few 
months or years there will again be a dark spot 
in the sky. They are there yet, but as dark stars. 

Now of such stars invisible to us there may be 
millions in the heavens. We have no reason to 
believe there are not. There is room for them, 
as there is for the visible stars, to continue on 
their mighty orbits or along their common paths. 
How do we know that our sun was not the result 
of some such collision ? That would have been 
the beginning of the creation of our solar system 



22 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

out of the materials of two elder suns, forming at 
first a vast huge mist of fire, and gradually cool- 
ing and condensing into our system of sun, plan- 
ets, satellites. 

We have, then, no reason to believe with any 
certainty, or even probability, that the beginning 
of the visibility of the stars we now see in the 
heavens was the beginning of their absolute exist- 
ence. They may have existed in other forms, as 
components out of which these present stars were 
made. Those previous components may also have 
passed through their cycle of change, the products 
of some previous collision; and this process may 
have continued on indefinitely in past time, for 
time which extends into a past eternity is long 
enough for any conclusion, no matter how slow 
the process. It would then seem that we do not 
find in the heavens themselves any evidence that 
limits certainly the date of its origin. 

Yet there may possibly be one such evidence 
of limit. If in case of collision of stars one is 
made out of two, then the number of stars, living 
or dead, is being constantly, and no matter how 
slowly, reduced. So far as I can see there is likely 
to be some such reduction. To be sure, in not 
every case of a new star must the two that meet 
join to form a new larger one, for the angle of 
approach may be such that they will only brush 
against each other, and then pass on with changed 
motions. But this will not explain such a sys- 



THE DATA FOR BELIEF 23 

tern as this of ours; nor will it explain the spiral 
nebulae. These must be cases of an actual union 
of the two into one, and in that case a lessening 
of the number of stars until, we may well conceive, 
they shall all be combined into one common 
mass. But that has not yet occurred, and it looks 
as if our stellar system had a beginning. 

That is, if there is any force which could pre- 
vent the stars moving indefinitely in their set 
courses so that they will not ever come into col- 
lision. But we know that some of them have 
come into collision. That might be because two 
orbits happen to cross each other, and the two 
stars happen to meet at the node. Then there 
would be sure to be a collision. Or we may 
imagine that there exists in space some retarding 
substance, lightly gaseous or meteoric dust, or 
larger meteoric objects which, meeting the moving 
star, are drawn to it and so, however insensibly, 
reduce its motion and so tend to bring it toward 
a common centre. No matter how infinitesimal 
this effect, yet in unlimited time the result would 
be sure at last to be reached. Every meteor that 
hits the earth somewhat changes its orbit and 
period of revolution. Yet we are not sure that 
these wandering masses or fragments of local 
matter exist in the stellar spaces. All we know is 
that they exist within our solar system and may 
have originated there. We do not certainly know 
that hyperbolic comets, or those that appear such, 



24 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

come from outside our system. The most we 
can say is, that, so far as we yet know, there is 
no limit that can be set to the beginning of our 
stellar universe, for the great bulk of stars may 
never come into collision, and their path may 
never be changed either by collision or by their 
permanent retention in a fixed orbit, nor their 
speed reduced by wandering free portions of 
matter so as to bring them into new colliding 
orbits. We only know that certain collisions have 
taken place. The stars give us no certain evi- 
dence in themselves as to whether in some form 
or other they have existed from eternity. But 
we do know that in their present condition their 
existence is within limits of time, for they have not 
yet ceased to expend their light and heat. 



CHAPTER II 
ETHER, MATTER, AND MIND 

I HAVE spoken of matter in its masses as suns 
and stars, as affording data which one should 
consider when asking what is the Cause of all 
things. We need to consider them more in their 
material, to ask what is their atomic constitution. 

Chemists tell us that everything we know — soil, 
rock, plants, animals — is made up of various com- 
binations of some eighty different elements. The 
combinations are innumerable, the components 
are few. These elements have, until lately, ap- 
peared to be final, undecomposable. Of them 
this earth is composed. 

But these elements, so called, are not elemen- 
tary. Each element, even the simplest, such as 
hydrogen, is itself a complex system of vastly 
smaller atomies called electrons, which move about 
each other and bump and sometimes escape, pos- 
sessed of velocities comparable to that of light, 
yet held together by a force far greater than any 
other force we can control. There are said to be 
a thousand of them in one atom of hydrogen. 
In a space of air not so big as a pea, one part in 
one hundred thousand is the gas neon, and of 

25 



26 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

that neon there are ten million million neon atoms, 
each one of those atoms composed of perhaps ten 
thousand electrons, charged with electricity, danc- 
ing about in spacious room. This is the wonder 
of matter, of all the matter we find on the earth. 
How is it with the stars ? 

There fall to the earth occasionally from the 
sky masses of matter, not of the earth, but of the 
nature outside of the earth. Analysis proves that 
they are composed of elements such as we are 
familiar with on the earth, metals, stones such as 
ours. We then would presume that the nature 
we do not know is all of it like the nature we do 
know. 

But we can be more positive. With the spec- 
troscope, whether a glass lens or a fine grating, 
we can break up the light from any flame into the 
colors of its spectrum, and across that spectrum 
will appear certain lines, and every element gives 
its own characteristic lines and tints. Thus 
hydrogen has one set of lines, carbon another, iron 
another. This method of analysis applied to the 
light of the sun shows that its highly heated pho- 
tosphere is made up of various elements familiar 
to us on the earth, for in its spectrum are the lines 
we find here in iron, carbon, or hydrogen. We 
then conclude that the material of which the sun 
is made is just the same as that of which the 
earth is made, and we begin to conclude that the 
sun and the earth belong to one single chemical 



ETHER, MATTER, AND MIND 27 

system, as well as to one system of orbital move- 
ment. The sun is proved to be of the same ele- 
mental constitution as our earth. The two are of 
one pattern. 

And spectral analysis has been applied to the 
stars, to such as emit light enough to allow it to 
be condensed and to form a spectrum; and we 
find that they too, and the nebulae as well, have 
precisely the same elements as we find on the 
earth, and they show no others. They too are 
of one pattern, one chemical scheme with our 
solar system. Some show a simpler spectrum 
than others, due, no doubt, to their different in- 
tensity of heat. Some have cooled down more 
than others; some are larger than others, some 
older than others very likely. They indicate 
various stages in the process of their refrigeration; 
and we may conclude that those which have 
cooled down so that they have ceased to emit 
light are also of the same chemical composition; 
for when they collide and give us a new star, that 
star shows the same familiar elements when 
analyzed with the spectroscope. The total uni- 
verse of stars is of one composition, forms one 
chemical system. 

Another point must be considered. Not only 
is the chemistry of all the known universe the 
same, with its atomic attractions therein involved, 
but we know that the other physical forces which 
control the stars are the same as control the earth. 



28 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

They have the same laws of heat. They kindle 
and cool in the same way. Their gravitation is 
the same, when two stars rush together, or double 
stars are held in their orbits by the balancing of 
their projectile force and their mutual attrac- 
tions, or where the nebulae display their spiral 
courses. Gravity rules the whole universe. And 
the laws of light work the same everywhere, the 
light of all the stars obeying the same law as con- 
trols that of a candle, carried equally on waves 
of ether. The whole great universe of starry 
worlds is one, built out of the same materials, 
moved by the same forces, governed by the same 
physical laws. It is all one single system, one 
law, one order of thought, one scheme, one geom- 
etry, one plan fitted to one formula, one unitary 
universe. 

Yet one more great fact must be considered 
before we can apprehend the full grandeur and 
marvel of the simple oneness of the vast complex- 
ity of our visible and invisible universe, visible in 
some of its separate concrete masses, invisible in 
its uncounted darkened stars; minute past all 
possible combination of lenses in its ultimate 
atoms; yet not merely invisible but impondera- 
ble, and to all the nicest deductions of science, 
immaterial, that pervasive something that fills the 
boundless spaces which separate the heavenly 
bodies; that next to nothing, mysterious, uni- 
versal ether whose waves bring us the record, not 



ETHER, MATTER, AND MIND 29 

of the stars only, but of every movement that we 
can perceive. It is this ether to which we must 
now direct our attention. 

We do not know certainly what ether is. It is 
usually considered a something, neither solid nor 
gaseous, scarcely to be named material, scarcely 
immaterial, 

"If substance might be called that shadow seemed, 
For each seemed either"; 

sui generis, not atomic but continuous, every- 
where freely mobile within the most condensed 
solids and filling equally all vacuums, having no 
quality that we know of except that, of carrying, 
like water and air, various sorts of vibrations, 
such as light and the current of wireless telegraphy, 
and by its inexplicable strain all the forces of 
gravitation. But the most remarkable power 
which is ascribed by physicists to ether is that of 
being the essence, substratum, or material of all 
chemical atoms, that is, of all matter. Physicists 
talk of ultimate atoms as nothing more than vor- 
tices or some other modification of ether. Some- 
how, somewhere, the invisible and inconceivably 
tenuous bits of ether were compacted into solid 
atoms of matter, or into the subatoms, electrons, 
out of which the atoms are composed. Once thus 
converted into matter these atoms, so far as we 
know, cannot lose their structure or their attrac- 
tions. We have never seen atoms resolved back 



3 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

into ether, nor have we seen them created out of 
ether. How they got their new motions we do 
not know, nor can we guess when they began to 
exist. We only believe that matter, all that ex- 
ists, here on the earth or in all the labyrinth of 
stars, is an inscrutable modification of ether, 
massed close and solid where earth and suns and 
stars are; but in all the void spaces where stars 
are not, incalculably vaster spaces, is uniform, 
continuous, inactive ether, doing nothing, only 
responsive to forces that impinge on it and pass 
through it, the matrix of all things, out of which 
all things came, and without which no life, in- 
deed no form of matter could exist, the source of 
all things, which in our later science replaces the 
old Eastern Chaos, or Tiamat, for it is 

"The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave, 
Of neither sea nor shore nor air nor fire, 
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed. ,, 

And equally ether is the universal medium which 
binds all things, that through which all forces act, 
from cohesion to gravity, apart from which the 
universe, if there were a universe, would be a 
chaos. In the straining of ether abide all the 
mightiest and all the tiniest forces we know. It 
is the mystery of the universe. Inactive ? Nay, 
the reservoir of all force. 
And what is the extent of this ether ? All we 



ETHER, MATTER, AND MIND 31 

can say is that it pervades and fills all space so 
far as our eager knowledge can pursue it. 

" Beyond the loom of the last lone star through open 
darkness hurled, 
Further than rebel comet dared, or hiving star-swarm 
swirled/' 

reach the confines of ether, for it embraces the 
outmost circuit of our stellar universe. 

Does it reach beyond, infinitely beyond, our 
system of stars ? We know not, for of the spaces 
beyond we can know nothing. If there be ether 
there no star shines to send us word. If there be 
no ether beyond, it would seem that no star could 
exist, if stars are made out of ether; or if not so 
made there would be no undulatory medium to 
bring us their light, only 

"a dark, 
Illimitable ocean without bound, 
Without dimension, where length, breadth and height 
And time and place are lost." 

But because, so far as we do know, to a distance 
that seems infinite to us, but is not infinite, the 
ether exists complete and effective, we can only 
presume that it exists still beyond, as infinite as 
infinite space itself, filling all space, competent 
to be the material of infinite worlds, and systems 
of worlds beyond the single Galactic Circle of 
suns within which our sun shines so splendid, so 



32 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

predominant to us, but seen from other worlds 
no more than an inconspicuous star. 

What the mighty visible and invisible universe 
shows to us is a boundless and infinite expanse of 
space, and all apparently occupied by the medium 
invisible, rigid, they tell us, yet inconceivably 
tenuous, though continuous, which we know as 
the luminiferous ether, boundless, infinite; but 
here and there solidified into chemical atoms, and 
these coalesced into suns and planets which seem 
huge in themselves, but which compared with the 
ethereal spaces in which they are dispersed, are 
but finite and relatively inconsiderable. Space is 
infinite, ether may be infinite, but the physical 
matter and substance of the worlds is finite, exist- 
ing and active only locally, while the infinitude of 
ether in which it moves, and out of which it was 
made, remains passive, formless, silent, yet pliant 
to the electrical and luminous and gravitational 
forces which it has itself created. But when and 
how did this ether, here and not there, transform 
its weightless, homogeneous substance into the 
heterogeneous qualities and attractions which 
constitute matter? That is the problem, the 
riddle of the universe, for which we crave an an- 
swer. Was it chance ? Was it God ? Will Na- 
ture herself answer ? 

But I have said that we do not know what 
ether is. It is generally held to be continuous, 
like a fluid. But there are those — the famous 



ETHER, MATTER, AND MIND 33 

chemist Mendeleeff was one — who think it a gas. 
An English physicist, Doctor A. Wegener, declares 
that the gas is coronium, which appears in the 
extreme heat of the corona of the sun, and in the 
blaze of meteors and in the northern lights many- 
miles up in the sky. Coronium has a combining 
weight many times less than that of hydrogen, and 
its own dispersive power would escape the attrac- 
tion of the earth. It is suggested that it therefore 
spreads in space as a light- transmitting gas. 

If so, if ether is merely such a tenuous gas as 
coronium, or ultimate electrons, thinly scattered 
in space, then it is not continuous; it does not 
fill the space in which it travels. If the amount 
of it is limited there will come a limit beyond 
which its atoms could not repel each other, and 
it would cease to diffuse itself. It would not be 
spread over all infinite space, and what is more 
important, it would be discontinuous, and there 
would be boundless interspaces which it did not 
occupy, but through which it simply passed. 
Yet even so it would be difficult to comprehend 
how the attractions or repulsions of the atoms of 
such a gas could be transported across the spaces 
between them without the existence of such a 
continuous substance as ether is usually supposed 
to be, I mention this view of ether as an attenu- 
ated gas simply to show that such a theory does 
not make it universal and infinite. 

Thus far I have gathered the data for the con- 



34 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

struction of a religious philosophy solely from life- 
less matter, earth, sun, and stars, for I cannot 
think of them as possessed of life or will. Phi- 
losophers may imagine that atoms dance of their 
own choice, or that a stone falls to the earth by 
a sort of volition, but to my mind, which is of the 
common sort, that seems merely poetical, imagi- 
native. Besides such dead matter there is living 
matter, plants and animals, that move under the 
direction of impulses that are not chemical. 
Only a briefer mention need here be made of the 
data of life and the data of mind, all to be treated 
of later. 

The human mind, and the lesser minds of 
brutes, and the life forces of animals and plants 
have in them powers quite absent in dead matter, 
in water, rocks, and earth. Man has a mind, what 
he sometimes calls his soul, and herein he possesses 
what differs radically from the chemic force of 
the sun, less radically from the lesser minds and 
wills of the beasts, and radically yet again from 
the power of life which we observe in the veg- 
etable world. He thus has two powers utterly 
different from those of the purely physical world: 
he has life and he has thought. The atoms of 
physical matter move, but they have not life. 
They have their own chemical and gravitational 
attractions; they move under fixed laws, they 
gather their molecules into crystals, they shiver 
in earthquakes, they rush and flash in lightning 



ETHER, MATTER, AND MIND 35 

and storm, as planets they whirl about the sun, 
and they blaze in the stars ; but it is all automatic, 
no act done by any will of their own. Nor is it 
by any life of theirs, for theirs is not a living force. 
Crystals grow, but not as plants grow. Their 
molecules gather, layer on layer, unchanged, and 
fill the rocks with regular forms; and the winter 
frost covers our window-panes with the simulacra 
of vegetation; but it is all the same lifeless, me- 
chanical force, utterly unlike the growth of 
plants or the will of man. 

Equally the thought and will and feeling of 
man are not found in the major part of the world 
which possesses life, the vegetable world. Life 
and mind we easily recognize as two different 
things. Man has both, plants have but one. We 
cannot believe — for we see no evidence — that the 
acorn swells, puts forth its two carpellary leaves, 
throws down its little roots, then sends up new 
and different foliage, grows and spreads into a 
mighty tree, through any voluntary action of its 
own. We call the strange, apparently purpose- 
ful, certainly directive movement which now con- 
trols its chemical and physical activities, which 
sends the sap upward and transforms it on the 
way into wood, and at the extremities into leafage 
and fruit— we call it vital force, for we must give 
it a name, although we do not at all understand 
it. The tree struck by lightning has no feeling 
of pain. The rose does not complain when it is 



3 6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

plucked; it has no fear, no pleasure, no will to 
grow. Even the sensitive plant is not sensitive. 
When the stamens of the barberry blossom touched 
by the leg of a bee snap against the pistil, or the 
leaves of the mimosa contract when rudely struck, 
or the lid of a pitcher-plant shuts down when an 
insect is caught within, it is no more an act of 
will than when the trap snaps on a mouse. There 
is a force we call life in the plant, but no will. 

And man differs from the rest of the animal 
world in that he has the new powers that belong 
to mind in a far higher degree than do they. In 
man and all the animals appear all the chemical 
and physical forces in full exercise; all the vital 
forces, and in addition those other new powers 
which we call mental or spiritual. The lower 
forms of animal life can feel; they can to some 
little or some greater degree, think and will. 
Even the minute bacteria, even the fixed coral 
polyp can move somewhat by its own choice. It 
is only the lowest grade of thought, but it is 
thought all the same, what man has, but in a 
far low r er degree. Half-way between the polyp 
and the man stand the dog and the elephant, 
and the chimpanzee, w T hose intellection seems the 
parody of that which we possess, in which we are 
supreme and wonderful. 

Consider the quality of what we call mind, for 
we have the habit of distinguishing it from the 
physical structure through which it acts, its func- 



ETHER, MATTER, AND MIND 37 

tions from those of the body. We suppose it to 
act somehow through the brain; other peoples 
have supposed it to be seated in the heart or the 
liver or the kidneys. "Thou triest my heart 
and my kidneys," says a Hebrew psalmist. Its 
powers are very different from those of the body. 
It moves the limbs; it is a master and the body 
is but a tool, as really so as is a hammer or a 
plough. Every such act is performed wholly by 
use of physical laws, but the control is not physical. 
It not only uses the body and other bodies, but 
it can be intensely active without visibly using 
the body at all, in hard thinking while absolutely 
quiet and physically at rest. While it commands 
the body and directs physical movements its own 
activity is very different from those physical 
movements. Its activities are intangible, im- 
ponderable, belonging to its own unique sphere, 
that of thinking, feeling, and willing. To be sure, 
there are certain physical modifications related 
to its activities, increased circulation of blood to 
the brain, and consumption of brain tissue, but 
the flow of blood to the brain, or the waste of 
brain tissue, is not thinking or feeling or willing, 
but something very different, belonging to a differ- 
ent plane, that to which we give a separate name, 
and call it mental or spiritual to distinguish it 
from the merely physical or vital. Whether or 
not this mind, soul, or spirit is a real entity, sepa- 
rate from the brain through which it acts, is to be 



38 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

considered later, but for the present I observe the 
fact that it has been the usual belief of the race 
that our mental action is not a mere function of 
the body, but that it belongs to what we call mind 
or soul, or spirit, something that is not material, 
and can properly be thought of as detachable 
from the body. 

These are the data, matter, life, and mind, of 
which we must inquire whether they bring any 
message of God. 



CHAPTER III 
HAD THE UNIVERSE A BEGINNING? 

THE one great question to be answered, if 
possible, in the study of nature about us is, 
as I conceive it, whether the conditions of 
nature are such as to indicate that it originated, 
moves, and changes by its own inherent force, 
of necessity, so that it always was, in some form 
or other, and always will be; or whether there is 
evidence that it did not always exist; or, at least, 
if it did exist from eternity that there appears 
within it evidence of forces not of itself, acting 
upon it, which have caused or modified the move- 
ments of which we have knowledge. In the one 
case nature is self -existent, eternal of itself; in 
the other case it is contingent, created, controlled 
by some superior outside power. To this great 
question I now address myself. 

In this study the first great basal fact is this: 
that because something exists now something 
must have always existed. That something which 
always existed may be the present nature, or it 
may be something on which the nature we know 
depends for its origin; some sort of existence 
there must have been from all eternity. For ex- 

39 



4 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

istence cannot come out of non-existence. Non- 
existence can create nothing, can evolve nothing. 
We cannot conceive of non-existence begetting 
existence. Ex nihilo nihil fit, that is a condition 
of thought. Everything must have a cause, in 
my philosophy, and in every one else's. I would 
not stop to try to argue what is an axiomatic law 
of thought. The cause of a present existence 
may be in itself; or this present existence may be 
contingent, dependent on something that previ- 
ously existed, as a house depends on a carpenter. 
But because there are objects now existing there 
must always have been actual concrete existence 
of some sort. 

That which always existed, and out of which 
the present course of nature has come, must have 
been actual concrete existence, something more 
than abstract imaginable relation. Such primal 
source of all things, standing under everything 
else, out of which nature has come, if nature be 
not eternal, can be no abstract quality or relation, 
like a geometrical truth, but must be something 
concrete, comparable, in matter or in mind, with 
the nature which is hypothetically supposed to 
have sprung from it. It is not such a merely de- 
pendent, relative truth as that the three angles of 
a triangle are equal to two right angles, nor is it 
anything like abstract virtue, which itself depends 
on the relation of one sentient being to another. 
Nor can it be such a category as time or space, 



HAD THE UNIVERSE A BEGINNING ? 41 

about which there is nothing concrete, and which 
can have no generative force. The fact that real 
matter, life, and mind now exist is proof that 
either they always existed, or that something 
equally substantial and real out of which they 
sprang always did exist. 

And, once more, that something which existed 
from before all eternity, which had no beginning, 
no pre-existing cause, must have found in itself 
the cause of its existence; it is self -existent. Its 
own nature requires it to exist. We can go no 
further. We cannot explain why or how that 
exists which had no beginning; and only know 
that because something exists now, something 
must, must of its own necessity, always have ex- 
isted, whatever that something is, matter or mind. 
We wish to learn whether existing nature gives 
us any indication what it is, matter or mind. 

I do not see that I have any right to judge 
whether that primal source and origin of all 
things, self-existent, of its own necessity, was 
material or spiritual, matter or mind, or whether 
both so existed eternally, or even both were fused 
in one. Matter and mind cover all the existences 
that we know or can conceive of. This is the 
dualism of nature, and I can see no reason for 
questioning the actual existence of both, which 
we know equally by their diverse qualities, one 
of bulk and weight, the other of consciousness and 
will. And self-existence we cannot comprehend. 



42 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

We can know the fact, but how or why I cannot 
know. I cannot venture to say whether the self- 
existent and eternal should be matter or mind, for 
why anything should exist at all is past my tinder- 
standing. 

Let no one tell me that the argument thus far 
presented is abstract or scholastic. I deny it. 
It is plain and simple, level to the comprehension 
of any one. It is that, because something now 
is, something always was, call it nature or call it 
God, and that what existed always, which had 
no antecedent cause, must have existed in the 
nature of things, had its cause in itself, was neces- 
sarily self-existent. This is simple, almost ax- 
iomatic, but it is large, grand. It takes in all 
necessities and all infinities. It carries us back- 
ward along the track of that measureless duration 
which has no beginning of bound. It brings us 
face to face with the primordium of nature, with 
that source within whose grasp was the vastness 
of the constellations, and the vaster mystery of 
the intelligences which inhabit and rule this 
planet, and we know not how many others. 

It is so utterly impossible for us to compre- 
hend a past eternity, and to conceive how out of 
a past eternity the present time could have been 
reached, that it is of no use for us to speculate 
over it. This fact we know, that out of a past 
eternity the present moment has come, and equally 
we know that out of a past eternity has come the 



HAD THE UNIVERSE A BEGINNING ? 43 

cosmic course of time which includes all the un- 
known history of the present universe, running 
back we cannot guess or imagine how far. Nor 
do we need in imagination to set a time within the 
current of eternity when the primal source began 
to generate the contingent existences. It may al- 
ways have done so, from eternity, so that in such a 
case nature, as we now know it, may be as eternal 
as its supposed eternal source, but yet just as con- 
tingent on its ever-acting eternal source as if it 
had begun to be generated at a definite point of 
time. 

And yet let it be clearly understood that no 
primal origin of all things could have existed 
always, from eternity, except as it existed by some 
necessity within itself. It did not come to exist 
by chance. And let it be further seen that such 
internal necessity of self -existence could be lim- 
ited by no time or place, for there would be the 
same necessity of existence at one time as at an- 
other. What exists of its own necessity must 
exist always, must exist everywhere. We can- 
not think it otherwise. A truth in geometry 
cannot be true in London and false in Peking. 
Any inherent necessity must be universal. This 
principle will supply our test in the study of pres- 
ent forms of existence. What does not exist 
everywhere and always does not exist of necessity. 
It is contingent, had a beginning, had a cause. 

And, first, does the ether, out of which, under 



44 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the current belief, all matter is derived, give evi- 
dence of being self-existent and eternal, or of 
being contingent and dependent on a cause ? 

Up to within quite modern times we have not 
known that there was such a thing as ether. 
When poets spoke of ether and the ethereal 
spaces, they meant the upper air. But after it 
was learned that it takes eight minutes for light 
to reach the earth from the sun, there came to 
be reason to believe that there is an elastic me- 
dium in space which carries light by its waves. 
We have later learned that this same medium 
which we call ether can carry our wireless teleg- 
raphy. Our physicists do not certainly know 
what ether is, but they know it is. The prevalent 
belief is that it is a continuous substance, differ- 
ent from all other matter known, hardly material, 
utterly imponderable, not subject to the attrac- 
tion of earth and stars, incompressible, perfectly 
elastic, absolutely filling all space. It is in a 
sense actually material, though hardly matter 
itself, for out of it all matter is made, and, what 
is most important to our discussion, it is univer- 
sally existent. 

So far as we know there is no space where ether 
is not. It is in the depths of the earth, within 
the constituents of the most solid rocks and 
metals, even within our own bodies. We live 
and move in it more truly than we live and move 
in the air about us. And there are no distant 
spaces, and none intervening, so far as we can dis- 



HAD THE UNIVERSE A BEGINNING? 4 S 

cover or guess, where ether is not. That light 
comes to us from the sun is proof that some 
atomic motion of intensely heated particles has 
communicated their motion to ether; and this 
intervening ether has brought the motion to in- 
conceivably small rods in our optic nerves. But 
the sun's ninety-five million of miles distance is 
insignificant compared with the distance of the 
few fixed stars whose distance astronomers have 
measured, and whose light must travel through 
many years unwasted before it reaches us; while 
countless other stars are many times more dis- 
tant, far beyond any angle of parallax which we 
can measure. Yet all through these distances on 
every side of us there is ether, ether unbounded, 
universal. 

And, apparently, far beyond the distances which 
are embraced in our stellar system. For the stars 
are all moving, like our sun, ten or twenty miles 
every second in space. In the millions of years 
during which we know our solar system to have 
existed it has been moving forward into new 
space, and yet we know — for the record of life in 
the lower strata proves it — always enveloped in 
ether. So the whole system of stars, whether 
moving individually or by a common motion, 
wherever they move forward, do not escape the 
ocean of ether. 

Is then this ether infinite? Has it no limits 
beyond the reach of our stellar universe? We 
know of none. If it can reach so far, we can see 



46 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

no reason why it may not reach beyond all con- 
ceivable bounds of our universe or all universes. 
It would appear to us that as space must be con- 
ceived as absolutely limitless, so ether appears to 
us to fill and occupy all this limitless space, and 
to be equally infinite. And if infinite in space, 
why not equally limitless and infinite in time? 
We cannot say. Ether everywhere co-ordinate 
with all space; ether always, co-ordinate with 
all time past and present, that is the apparent 
conclusion to which our present knowledge con- 
ducts us. 

If ether is, as usually believed, a continuous 
form of subsistence absolutely filling all space as 
water fills the ocean, filling it completely, without 
interstices or vacancies, and if, as we may well 
believe, it always has thus existed, then for all 
we can judge thus far, it may be self-existent. 
We do not see that it, with such a constitution, 
carries any evidence that it had a beginning and 
was created. 

But it is not quite settled that the ether is such 
a continuous substance. I have mentioned that 
a famous Russian chemist believed it to be an 
excessively thin gas; and that this theory has 
lately been developed by Doctor A. Wegener, who 
finds that coronium, a hypothetical gas many 
times lighter than hydrogen, shown by the spec- 
troscope to exist in the corona of the sun, is dis- 
covered also in the flashes of light from meteors 



HAD THE UNIVERSE A BEGINNING? 4 7 

and the aurora borealis. Its dispersive power 
would be such that it would escape the attraction 
of the earth, and it would spread itself in the spaces 
above our atmosphere. Doctor Wegener, as pre- 
viously said, believes that it is coronium that is 
diffused everywhere, and that it is the light-bear- 
ing medium. If such is the true theory, then it 
is all the ether there is, and it is corpuscular, like 
the other gases, and does not fill space continu- 
ously, but occupies an excessively small portion 
of it; and then it is not self -existent, for it does 
not exist everywhere, but is contingent and had 
a cause for its existence. Equally all other the- 
ories such as that which denies its existence and 
holds light to consist of emitted particles, can al- 
low no evidence of self -existence. For the present 
we must incline to the prevalent view that ether 
is continuous, exists everywhere, and for all we 
can know may exist eternally, by its own inherent 
necessity, the primum mobile, the source if not 
the cause of all things, even as Plato conceived of 
space not as a void but a plenum, self -existent, 
eternal as God, and the material out of which all 
things are made. The most that we can say is that 
for all we can judge from the evidence open to us, 
ether may be necessarily self-existent and eternal, 
as self-existent and eternal as the Being about 
whose existence we are making search, and whom 
we call God. Is ether, then, all the God that 
exists ? That requires further study. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE STELLAR UNIVERSE— HAD IT A 

CAUSE ? 

IN the previous chapter I found myself unable 
to discover in ether, the one all-pervading 
substance out of which apparently all things 
are made, any sure evidence that it has a Creator, 
that it is not self -existent, as eternal as the God 
of religion whom we have been taught to look 
upon as the Source and Creator of all things. I 
now turn to ask of this material world on which 
we live, and of the worlds which astronomy tells 
of, whether they had a beginning and a cause. 
Is it true that "the undevout astronomer is mad M ? 
We must consider the material universe as we 
know it, in its masses and in its molecular consti- 
tution. What has such matter to tell us of its 
self-existence or its contingency ? 

And, first, we find matter massed into huge 
planets like our earth, or into vaster suns and 
stars. If they are self-existent and eternal they 
must carry the evidence thereof. They must 
show no time limit of existence, and they must 
show universality in space; for what is self -exist- 
ent by its own necessity, must exhibit that neces- 

48 



THE STELLAR UNIVERSE 49 

sity always and everywhere. It cannot be neces- 
sary in one part of space and unnecessary in an- 
other part of space. It must fill all space as does 
the ether as far as we know; and equally it must 
comprehend all time — otherwise it has a cause; 
it cannot happen by chance, out of nothing. 

That planets and suns do not fill all space is 
the fact. Matter is not everywhere, unless ether 
is matter. The suns and planets are separated 
from each other by vast interspaces, so that their 
own bulk, big as it is, is inconsiderable as com- 
pared with the vacancies between them. So dis- 
tant is the nearest star to us that its point of light 
can be enlarged by no telescope. Matter at its 
best fills, or appears to fill, only limited spaces 
like that occupied by our earth or our sun, spaces 
where are aggregated rocks, earth, air, vapors; but 
outside of them in spaces immeasurably greater 
is nothing, nothing except as ether is something. 
If matter exists necessarily, there could be no 
vacant spaces. It would exist everywhere the 
same. Instead of that it exists exceptionally. 
It therefore exists contingently, not necessarily. 
For existing as we see it, it must have had a be- 
ginning, a cause outside of itself. 

That is proof sufficient, so far as space is con- 
cerned; but, for fuller consideration of the great 
question, let us also ask what are the facts acces- 
sible to us as to the existence of the universe of 
matter in time. Can we assert or deny that it 



So WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

has always existed in time ? This question does 
not allow a short answer, as does the question as 
to the necessary existence of matter in space; 
for the fact that matter does evidently not exist 
universally in space is itself conclusive of its con- 
tingency. 

We see the heavenly bodies in two states, one 
intensely heated and emitting light like the sun 
and stars, the other not luminous, refrigerated, 
like our earth and moon. We know that the 
earth was once a molten mass like the sun; but 
it has cooled down unmeasured ages ago, though 
still heated to its centre. We know that the 
larger planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, have not 
yet cooled down so completely as has the earth, 
and are surrounded by a thick envelope of vapor 
which does not allow their solid surface to be 
seen. When we turn to the stars we find that 
they appear, so far as we can see them, to be in 
the same condition as the sun, molten masses of 
fire. But they are not all in quite the same con- 
dition; some are larger than others, some hotter 
than others, showing different stages of condition, 
as proved by the spectroscope. Then there are 
in the heavenly spaces invisible stars or planets 
which have cooled down, like our earth, till they 
cease to be luminous. We know it because we 
have variable stars, whose light is temporarily 
obscured, as if by some intervening lesser planet 
or companion star that has ceased to emit light. 



THE STELLAR UNIVERSE 51 

That there are such we know further from the 
occasional appearance of temporary new stars. 
They are explained by the coming of two invisible 
stars, or one of them invisible, together, drawn 
by their mutual attraction. Their collision raises 
them to enormous heat, and they become visible. 
The conclusion is that in the stellar universe 
there are stars of all stages of condition; multi- 
tudes that are like our sun, hotter or not so hot, 
some of lesser heat and dimmer light, some quite 
extinct as luminous stars, and for aught we know 
there are dead suns more numerous, perhaps 
vastly more numerous than the molten, visible 
suns. This much is clear, that the suns, as we 
know them, have a temporary existence. They 
have had a beginning in time as stars in their 
present condition of visibility or invisibility. 
For each one is giving off heat constantly and re- 
ceiving none, or next to none, from other stars. 
Our sun is cooling down, and in the course of 
time must itself become a dead sun, as invis- 
ible to the possible inhabitants of the planetary 
system of Sirius, if such there will be, as is the 
earth. And the same is true of Sirius and every 
other star in the heavens. Every one must have 
had a beginning as a star, because the process of 
cooling is not completed, and the past eternity 
of time is sufficient to have completed it if it had 
had no beginning. The stars, as stars, are con- 
tingent in time, as well as in space. 



52 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

But this does not quite settle the question, for 
the fact that we actually see before us new stars 
appearing in the heavens is evidence that a dead 
star may be revived, and renew, like the phoenix, 
its existence. If once or twice in a century we 
see such a tremendous creation in the heavens, 
we do not know but that in uncounted past eons 
every star we see was thus created, every star 
suddenly bursting into flame, and then in the 
process of ages cooling its heat, dimming its fire, 
until it again becomes invisible and dead, await- 
ing its turn in a fresh collision to repeat the course 
of history from secular heat to secular cold. 
This at least we are sure of, that every star we 
see, which has not yet finished its course and be- 
come invisible, has had its beginning as such a 
star in a definite past time, for it has not yet 
completed its range of progressive relapse. Such 
is the case with our sun, with every star. The 
mathematician can calculate from the present 
heat of the sun and the rate at which it loses heat 
how long it will be before it becomes extinct, and 
so for any other star if he can know its condi- 
tions. Each star is on its way to a state which 
it has not yet reached, but which it would have 
reached if it had existed from eternity. A mul- 
titude of stars have, in all probability reached 
that stage and to our eye become extinct. All had 
their beginning; none are eternal. 

But we may ask, if the separate stars have each 



THE STELLAR UNIVERSE 53 

had a beginning in time, is that true of the system 
of stars as a whole? May it not have been re- 
peatedly and perpetually renewing itself? This 
requires consideration. 

I have spoken of the stellar system as single 
and unitary, after the hitherto usual manner 
among astronomers. Lord Herschel knew that 
stars were in motion, and he conceived them as 
all revolving, like our planets, about a common 
centre. But at present the most advanced stu- 
dents of the starry heavens find not one, but two 
systems of stars, moving in different directions, 
coming out of different portions of space, and now 
entangled together. The stars in the Milky Way 
belong to one system that has younger stars, show- 
ing helium lines, while the other system is older. 
This gives us a different and startling view of the 
universe. With such diverse movements in the 
two systems there is danger, such as there was 
not before, of the approach of one star to another, 
as the course of a star in one system might ap- 
proach the course of a star in another. This ex- 
plains the genesis of new stars, and provides a 
way for the regeneration of exhausted stars and 
the continuance of the systems with their light 
and heat. The two approaching dead stars, that 
have in the course of countless ages lost their heat 
and are thus invisible, happen to come within the 
reach of each other's attraction, and meet with 
a velocity of four hundred miles a second; but, 



54 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

having each their own proper motion, they may 
not meet head on, but graze each other, breaking 
off portions of each which burst out into the most 
intense heat and dissolve in fiery vapor, forming 
a new star; while the main portions of the two 
are likely to fly away on their altered courses, 
losing their velocity by the backward pull of at- 
traction, and are lost in space, while the nova, 
first expanding into a nebula, then loses its light 
and ultimately disappears to sight. Thus we 
seem to see new stars produced, and such may be 
conceived to be the cosmic origin and course of 
all the stars that we see move through the sky. 
But, even so, it does not seem likely that our uni- 
verse of visible stars could indefinitely reproduce 
itself; only a small fraction of stars approaching 
would actually collide. The comets do not fall 
into the sun, but diverge and go on. So most 
stars visible and heated would escape each other 
and continue to give out their heat and ultimately 
become extinct. That this has not yet occurred 
seems to be some proof that the stellar system, or 
systems, had a beginning. 

But there is a yet more serious point of view. 
If there are two systems of stars, as Kapteyn and 
Professor Boss tell us, then the universe is not 
unitary but dual. The two systems can hardly 
be conceived as coming into existence together, 
out of any necessary inherent force — each had a 
beginning, and a different contingent occasion of 
beginning, whatever we may call the source. 



THE STELLAR UNIVERSE 55 

These two streams, or systems, of stars, we 
are told, are of different ages — one has newer 
stars than the other, has stars with helium lines, 
while the other has none. Its stars have not 
through countless ages been regenerated whether 
by collision or by the absorption of nebular matter, 
or whatever the original world-stuff may have 
been. If one is older than the other, and is further 
along in the line of extinction, they had each a 
beginning at different times, and a separate con- 
tingent source of beginning, whatever we may call 
that source. Nor does it make any difference if 
we conceive of an infinite number of such systems 
far beyond our ken, for they exist separately, out 
of forces acting individually and not universally, 
and so not of necessity but contingently. And 
contingency means some exterior force, directing, 
controlling, whether we call it God or not. 

I think that the nature and direction of move- 
ment of the stars in the two swarms has a bear- 
ing on our subject. It was conjectured by as- 
tronomers, before the existence of two separate 
streams of stars was known, that they had all 
their orbits, and were revolving about a common 
centre. That does not now seem probable, and 
the fact of the two swarms coming together seems 
to negative it. At their enormous distances gravi- 
tation could hardly hold them to a common orbit ; 
and a common orbit of all the stars would prevent 
collision. The moon is held to the earth by a 
force equal to a steel cable fifteen or twenty miles 



56 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

in diameter; but attraction diminishes as the 
square of the distance, and the attraction of one 
star to another, and to their common centre would 
be insignificant as compared with their enormous 
projectile momentum. If, then, they are moving 
directly through space and not in an orbit, they 
must have passed through billions and billions of 
miles of space, and that affords likely proof that 
ether is infinite in space, for the strain of ether is 
supposed to be the source of all force. Another 
conclusion is that a swarm of stars not moving in 
orbits must even by slight attraction be gradu- 
ally drawn together, and in time will, unless they 
have diverse velocities so that they will separate 
from each other, be brought to a common centre. 
But this has not yet happened. The fact that 
they are still separate while still retained in their 
swarms, and are not yet drawn into one mass, is 
evidence that our stellar universe has not existed 
from all eternity, but had a beginning in time as 
well as a limit in space, and so is not eternal and 
self -existent, but had a cause outside of itself. 

This indication is from the side of motion. 
We may consider it somewhat further from the 
side of heat. 

It is the nature of all other forms of energy to 
be transformed, under the well-known laws of 
the conservation of energy, one into another and 
without loss. But when any other form of en- 
ergy is transformed into heat, it can then be dis- 



THE STELLAR UNIVERSE 57 

sipated and lost. Thus a hot body is constantly 
giving out heat, whether a candle or a sun. Its 
heat radiates into space, and may be captured by 
some body which it meets, or it may be lost be- 
cause it meets no object to absorb it. Thus the 
earth and other planets intercept a little of the 
heat radiated by the sun, but most of it passes 
into space, and is dissipated and lost. Equally 
every star possesses its individual quantum of 
total force, or energy, of which one part is its 
proper motion in space, say a dozen or more miles 
in a second; the other is its heat. Its heat is be- 
ing constantly dissipated ; it passes off into space, 
and at last will leave the star in the condition of 
absolute cold, possessed of no force except its mo- 
tion in space. 

Thus the total amount of energy in the stellar 
universe represented by heat is certainly being 
dissipated, and if not regenerated in some way 
will be finally exhausted. The universe will run 
down; the stars will all be dead stars. But, as 
this has not yet happened, it must follow that the 
universe had a beginning in time, and therefore 
some cause for its beginning. 

One way, however, in which it might occur to 
us to escape this conclusion is, as already indi- 
cated, by the generation of fresh force by the 
attraction of two approaching and colliding bodies. 
But this raises the question whether there is in 
the case of such attraction any real addition to 



58 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the total energy of the universe. Does it con- 
tradict the law of the conservation of energy ? 
From any source, like the attraction of gravita- 
tion, can dissipated energy be restored ? 

The attraction of gravitation is the greatest of 
all the mysteries of physics. We call it gravita- 
tion, but giving it a name does not explain why 
an apple falls to the ground. We know of no ex- 
planation. We only know that it does fall to 
the ground, and that in every fraction of an in- 
stant in its fall it gets an increment of its force 
and velocity. The earth does not touch it ; noth- 
ing does touch it except air and ether. Something 
must move it that touches it, but it is not air that 
does it, for it falls faster in a vacuum where there 
is no air, only ether. It seems to follow that 
ether moves it, either pulls it or pushes it, but why 
or how we do not know. I suppose that ether is 
the great storehouse of energy which supports the 
whole universe. I suppose that when an apple 
falls to the ground, ether moves it, or ether- 
strains, like the strain of a rubber band, pull or 
push it; that when the moon or earth is held 
down to its orbit ether-strains do it. And I do 
not see that this force has come through any 
transformation of any previous force. We speak 
of potential energy, which is simply the expres- 
sion for the amount of attraction which would 
draw an apple downward if it were free to fall 
from the tree. It is measured by what we call 



THE STELLAR UNIVERSE 59 

weight, and its amount depends on its distance 
from the attracting body. 

Now, a great gain in kinetic energy is acquired 
when two stars moving at the rate of ten or 
twenty miles a second approach each other until 
their velocity is increased to perhaps four hun- 
dred miles a second; and I cannot see that any 
corresponding amount of energy has been lost to 
balance it. It would seem that this new energy 
has been provided out of the inexhaustible source 
of all energy, the force within the ether. And this 
new energy of motion is being transferred by the 
collision of two stars into vast amounts of heat. 
This added energy thus created might in a mea- 
sure balance the total energy lost by the dissipa- 
tion of heat; and in this way the argument for a 
beginning in time might be more or less invali- 
dated. Yet it is not clear that the constant loss 
of heat would or could be thus balanced and re- 
stored. The countless stars are giving out heat 
constantly, while the cases of new stars are not 
only few and rare, but so far as we have recorded 
them they are temporary. They soon fade away. 
They seem to have added little to the sum of 
energy in the universe during their brief existence, 
while the loss of energy by the dissipation of heat 
is constant and enormous. 

In another way we could imagine a condition 
in which dissipated heat would be restored. If 
we could think of ether as limited in space, and its 



6o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

limits a sharp wall, then dissipated heat might 
be reflected back again; yet, even so, only an in- 
finitesimal portion of this reflected heat would be 
caught by the stars, unless we were allowed to 
conceive of the dead stars as so numerous as to fill 
the whole sky. This is so improbable and so 
destitute of evidence that we may dismiss it from 
consideration. Even so, the heat restored would 
leave the stars still invisible and dead, and would 
only increase the argument for the final extinction 
of the stars yet visible to us. 

Thus the conclusion derived from as wide a 
study of the evidence as our present knowledge 
of the stellar universe yields to us would make it 
appear pretty clearly that this universe must fin- 
ally expend its energy and run down like a clock. 
The fact that, notwithstanding all changes and 
renewals, it has not yet run down is evidence that 
this universe had a beginning in time, and there- 
fore had a cause for beginning, a great Cause out- 
side of itself, some such cause as we have been 
in the habit of conceiving under the word God. 
The conditions of time equally with those of 
space indicate that the stellar universe does not 
exist by any inherent necessity of its being. It 
is limited in space, and it appears to be equally 
limited in time. It is finite, contingent, condi- 
tioned, had a beginning and a Cause. 



CHAPTER V 

THE ATOMIC CONSTITUTION OF THE 
UNIVERSE 

AFTER having considered matter in its masses, 
r\ as worlds and suns, I return to question it 
as to its constituent atoms. Do they give 
any testimony either as to their necessary exist- 
ence or as to their contingency ? 

And first, what are these chemical atoms of 
which all things are made ? They are some eighty 
in number, or have been so regarded until lately, 
ultimate atoms, such as oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, 
gold, iron, and the rest. How long they have ex- 
isted we do not know, but that they do not exist 
by any inherent necessity we know with certainty 
from the fact that they are, each one of them or 
all of them together, strictly limited in space, like 
the worlds that are made out of them. No one 
of them occupies all space. Where one of them 
is the rest are not. They occupy a relatively 
small, an exceedingly small fraction of all space. 
They are themselves excessively minute dots, or 
points, within surrounding space, and, as has been 
said of them, they have the appearance of being 
manufactured objects. Because they are such, 

61 



62 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

because they do not exist everywhere by their 
own necessity of existence, they are not eternal — 
they had a beginning in time, a cause. 

We further know of certain individual chemical 
atoms that they have not always existed, but had 
a beginning. Radium and several other elements 
that have a high combining weight of over two 
hundred are constantly and slowly disintegrating, 
breaking up by emanations into elements of smaller 
combining weight. Thus radium gives off helium, 
and uranium and thorium also are unstable and 
give off their products. But they still exist un- 
exhausted in the earth. They are steadily losing 
bulk, but are not all gone. They would have been 
exhausted long ago if they had always existed. 
They are not eternal; they had a beginning, a 
cause, in time. 

But there is something more to be said of them. 
They are so related to each other in the increasing 
and regular order of their combining weight, under 
what is called Mendeleeff's law, that they appear 
to be themselves composite, made up of smaller 
ultimate, or more nearly ultimate, atoms. That 
such is the fact in the case of some of them is 
proved by their actual decomposition, as in the 
case of radium. This sends us back to the 
question whether these smaller and perhaps orig- 
inal atomlets are made in time, or are themselves 
eternal because self -existent. We are told that 
there are a thousand of them in one atom of hydro- 



THE ATOMIC CONSTITUTION 63 

gen, the simplest of all the eighty elements, that 
they carry each an electric charge, and that they 
escape as ions in chemical reactions. Now what 
are these apparently primal, infinitesimal elec- 
trons, as they are called, out of which the eighty 
chemical elements, and so the whole universe of 
earth and stars, are made ? 

It is not fully known, but the prevailing belief 
is that they are made out of the ether itself, and 
are of no different material and stuff. They are 
spoken of as perhaps whorls, vortices, little mael- 
stroms within the ether; and they attract each 
other, and their combinations form the chemical 
elements, oxygen, carbon, and the rest, a thou- 
sand of them dancing about in one atom of hydro- 
gen, and over two hundred times as many in a 
complex atom of radium. Why they attract each 
other and unite definitely in various sorts of atoms 
with individual qualities and powers we do not 
know; but we do know that every one of the 
eighty atoms is made up of these minuter elec- 
trons; and it is probable that these electrons are 
nothing else but points of movement, and so of 
force, in ether. 

Now, ether we have found to be universal, fill- 
ing, so far as we can judge, all space and, for aught 
we can judge, always in existence, from before 
the existence of all things. We can discover in 
its conditions no evidence that it is not uncreated, 
self-existent, and eternal. What can we say of. 



64 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

these modifications in it, these whorls, vortices, or 
rings in it which we call electrons ? 

Precisely what we say of the eighty elements. 
They have every appearance of being contingent. 
They exist here, and not there. They are found 
in swarms in an atom of radium, in a molecule of 
water, in the mass of the earth, and in the thinner 
medium of the air. But nowhere that they are 
found do they fill the space. They have room to 
move in an atom of hydrogen ; they are very widely 
separated in the air; outside of the atmosphere 
that surrounds the earth there are none. In the 
interstellar spaces there exists simple ether, un- 
modified, not deflected into that force which ap- 
pears in the vortical electron. In the vast spaces 
between the stars are no atoms, no electrons. 
Only at rare places, where there is a star, do we 
find the force existing which has caused the ether 
to develop vortices, electrons, and these to com- 
bine into atoms, and these again into worlds. 
This fact is of immense importance. It proves 
that matter, as we know it apart from ether, has 
no inherent power of self -existence ; for it has 
come into existence as electrons only at excep- 
tional locations within space. Whether ether ex- 
ists by its own necessity we may not know; we 
have no evidence to deny it ; but we do see plainly 
that, however ether exists, it does not through any 
necessity of its own project itself into whorls of 
material electrons and atoms, for it does not do 



THE ATOMIC CONSTITUTION 65 

so everywhere. Matter, even in its most original, 
primal, subatomic forms, is exceptional, occasional, 
and therefore not necessary. It has a cause, an 
outside cause; a cause antecedent to itself, older 
than itself, and different from the material, the 
ether, out of which it is made. 

An objection which might have been made to 
the proof that atoms had a beginning in time is 
not valid as against electrons. It might be said 
that atoms may have had an indefinite number of 
beginnings. It might be that when a dead sun 
is regenerated with the most intense heat all the 
chemical atoms in it might be disintegrated and 
resolved into their simplest constituent element, 
just as coronium not yet found on the earth ap- 
pears in the most heated outrushes of flame in 
the sun's corona. Very true. It may be that 
in the collision of two dead or living stars the re- 
sultant heat would be so extreme that all the 
chemical atoms, even hydrogen, would be broken 
up and disappear. But the material out of which 
they are composed, the final electrons, would re- 
main as they were until at a lowering tempera- 
ture they were recombined. These ultimate elec- 
trons, no matter through how many dissipations 
they have passed, still remain the same local, 
manufactured, contingent points of force, carry- 
ing in themselves the evidence that they exist by 
no necessity in themselves and are not eternal, 
but have an exterior cause. 



66 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

And here I cannot but stop to marvel at the 
mystery of the forces somehow imbedded in the 
charge of electricity that gives its push and pull 
to that infinitesimal, darting, approaching, re- 
treating point — or shall I say whorl of ether which 
we call an electron. What makes it dance so ? 
How could those countless atomlets, those infinite 
infinitesimals, all identical, having the same charge 
of force, combine in such strange ways ? Why 
should a thousand of them appear to us as hydro- 
gen, and twelve thousand of them, all just the 
same, appear as carbon, and thirty-two thousand 
as sulphur, and one hundred and ninety-seven 
thousand as gold, and two hundred and twenty- 
seven thousand as radium ? And take carbon, 
composed of the same number of identical elec- 
trons, and yet somehow appearing sometimes as 
charcoal, sometimes as graphite, and again as 
diamond. If it was said long ago, before we heard 
of electrons, that the atom looks like a manufac- 
tured body, it looks so all the more now that we 
know what it is made of. 

But I must recall myself to remember that 
wonder is no evidence. What is of evidence is 
the clear fact that these atoms, and these elec- 
trons that compose them, are not self-existent. 
They have a cause for existence outside of them- 
selves, are contingent. Yet let us consider for a 
moment the strange fitnesses of these chemical 
elements, eighty or so of them, differentiated out 



THE ATOMIC CONSTITUTION 67 

of undifferentiated electrons, made to combine, 
as of their own will in so many useful ways, as 
if the parts of a complicated machine or engine 
should of their own force leap to fit and adjust 
themselves into their proper places. These ele- 
ments, all made of the same stuff, possess each 
their separate, discrete properties and attributes, 
their varying attractions, and are capable of com- 
bining with each other in definite proportions, pro- 
ducing new substances, each of which has its own 
peculiar qualities, acid, base, salt, whatever they 
may be, and these, again, fitted for new combina- 
tions under definite, fixed laws. Thus is created 
an extraordinary system of gases and liquids and 
crystalline solids, fitted to each other, all congru- 
ous, and each depending for its existence on in- 
ternal congruities without which it could not 
exist. No one knows this so well as does the 
chemist, and the chemist wonders at the attrac- 
tions and delicate adjustments which go to make 
up the crystalline and colloid substances, the 
liquids and gases, out of which this world and all 
worlds are made. I do not just now speak of the 
adaptations of these various substances for the 
sustentation of physical life — that is another 
matter — but of the amazing succession of beauti- 
ful laws under which all these things have been 
produced, all developing themselves or somehow 
developed, out of what ? Out of the minute, 
identical atomies, of which atoms are composed, 



68 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

and all depending for their production on the 
movements and attractions and forces which have 
come to be possessed by these final elemental elec- 
trons. To me that is quite as wonderful as is the 
profusion and the variety of life, vegetable and 
animal, which has filled the earth through all the 
geologic ages. And when I think that all chem- 
ical and all mechanical forces, and all the forces 
of gravitation, must have issued primarily, with 
all their developments, fire, wind, storm, thunder, 
tides, light, heat, electricity, the daily, annual, and 
secular movements and revolutions of planets, 
suns, and stars, out of the initial, infinitesimal but 
combined yet inexplicable forces that have some- 
how got attached here and there, only here and 
there, to electrons which have managed somehow 
to get segregated and concreted out of impalpable 
ether, all forming a nicely co-ordinated system of 
universal nature, the marvel has grown beyond 
expression. The most amazing, most unaccount- 
able fact in all nature, next to the limited existence 
of matter, is the self-acting motility of the elec- 
trons. Nothing pushes them; like little demons 
they push themselves. Nothing stops them; they 
keep in perpetual motion. On their ceaseless mo- 
tion which has the appearance of vitality, depend 
all other forces unless it be gravitation. These 
are the composite of the subatomic forces of these 
electrons. What makes them move ? No physi- 
cist can tell. He can only say it is their nature. 



THE ATOMIC CONSTITUTION 69 

Hardly less inscrutable is the combination of these 
ultimate identical electrons into the eighty diverse 
elements, with their following fixed and regulated 
combinations under definite laws of chemical at- 
tractions into the concreted diverse substances of 
more complicated order that compose the worlds. 

Thus connected, thus dependent, the universe 
is all the same at bottom, one system, composed 
of the same electrons, the same chemical elements, 
creating the same substances, under the same laws, 
in all worlds, to the most distant "reach of the 
outmost sun through utter darkness hurled.' ' Is 
this all chance ? But we know there is no such 
thing as chance. Why did the whorls, or vor- 
tices, or strains, that made the electrons all come 
alike, separating by regiments to form atoms of 
hydrogen, and by tens and hundreds of thousands 
to form other elements ? Why do they carry the 
same charge of electricity? Or if there are two 
kinds of electricity, one positive and one negative, 
why two ? That makes it all the more wonderful 
and the more evidently contingent. 

From whatever point of view we look at our 
universe, electron, atom, molecule, or mass, earth 
or stars, our total survey brings us to one conclu- 
sion, that all is contingent, that all have at some 
point of time come into being, that all have had 
an external and not an internal cause for existence. 
What that cause is we have not yet found out, 
but this seems clear, that the material universe, 



7 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

as we know it, is not self-made, self -existent, 
eternal, but is dependent for its existence on some- 
thing that went before and had the power to 
produce it. 

Was that pre-existent something that had power 
to produce it the ether, which is the material, we 
are told, out of which all these things are made ? 
It clearly is not the ether. To be sure, the ether 
appears, so far as we can judge, to be infinite in 
space, and may be equally infinite in time. But 
it is essentially material, has material qualities, 
is transformed into material things, has no will 
to transform itself. Nor does it transform itself 
into resistant, concrete matter by any inherent 
necessity within itself, for it is transformed only 
occasionally and sparingly. The great stellar 
spaces remain as ether untransformed. Only in 
occasional and selected spots has ether been trans- 
formed into worlds; and this change has been 
made not by the ether itself, but out of ether by 
some extraneous power working upon it. And 
this whole universe of ours has been produced on 
one pattern, out of the same electrons and ele- 
ments, under precisely the same laws, and of pre- 
cisely the same materials. It is thus one universe, 
distributed in space, filling in its total of matter 
but the most infinitesimal fraction of the space in 
which it moves. It is all of it, all except ether, 
contingent, temporal, had its beginning, is local- 
ized in space, had some cause for existence apart 



THE ATOMIC CONSTITUTION 71 

from itself or the ether in which it floats. It must 
go back for its origin to some other self-existent 
force, whatever it may be, something else self- 
existent besides the ether out of which it is made. 
Something is eternal. We cannot comprehend 
beginninglessness in time, but it is a fact and we 
must accept it. Something always was because 
something now is. It could not have come out of 
nothing, for out of nothing nothing can be born. 
That primal something is back of matter and back 
of ether. It has worked upon ether selectively, 
acting upon it only locally and sparingly, giving 
definite movements and powers to its derivative 
electrons, but such powers as are fitted to form 
intricate combinations into atomic systems, many 
thousands of them moving in orderly arrangement 
in a single chemical element, and then combining 
further into all the forms of matter of which the 
worlds are made. Whether as electrons, atoms, 
or systems, they are not haphazard, they have the 
appearance of being manufactured, and they are 
organized into what appears to be an orderly 
scheme, as if prearranged by an antecedent cause, 
a cause that has will, that has intelligence, such 
a cause as is embraced in the term God. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PUZZLE OF THE INFINITE 

INFINITY is not a problem; it is a fact. It 
can be puzzled over, if we choose, but there 
it is, not to be denied, staring us in the face. 
It is of no use for me to puzzle myself trying to 
conceive the limits of the infinites. There are 
such things as space and time; I know it, and 
time and space are limitless, have no beginning 
and no end. I know that, too, and yet I cannot 
understand how out of that which had no begin- 
ning I could have reached this particular point 
in space and time. The difficulty is more about 
time than space; for space is static. I can in 
imagination go anywhere and find room. But 
time is not permanent, static. It is an infinitely 
broad current, an ocean without bounds, moving, 
ever moving onward, onward from back of all con- 
ceivable beginning. How could I have happed 
upon existence just now, in this little inch of 
endlessness, and my father in his inch, instead 
of my succession and his occurring an infinite 
million of ages back ? But here I am, and why 
should I try to puzzle myself with the infinite 
past when I know for certain the present ? Why 

72 



THE PUZZLE OF THE INFINITE 73 

seek to track back to its source the beginning of 
unbeginning time? I may try to explain it to 
myself by thinking of time as a circle which has 
no beginning because it repeats itself, but that is 
fallacious. Time is no cyclic revolution. It is a 
sweep ever forward, never backward; never like 
the Egyptian figure of eternity, the serpent swal- 
lowing its tail. I am here; I am now — that fact 
I know, and the puzzle how I came to be here and 
now need not distract me from the fact. The 
fact of the infinite is simple and clear, easy to 
apprehend; but the how and why of it, its com- 
pass and extent, is past finite comprehension. 

We come upon this puzzle of the infinite when 
it occurs to us to ask, When did the great prime 
cause begin to create the universe ? Was it in 
time, or was it from all eternity ? Our argument 
has shown us that all the forms of visible matter 
we know of are contingent, dependent; but it has 
set no time for their beginning, no time when 
electrons and atoms began to be concreted out 
of ether; only that the present forms of the worlds 
had a beginning in time; but we did not know 
how many times the stars and suns had died into 
the cold of frigid space and been regenerated as 
nebulae and suns to ' ' trick their beams ' ' and ' l flame 
in the forehead of the morning sky." 

Some great primal creative cause must have 
existed from all eternity. Now can we believe 
that this cause existed from an eternity before 



74 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

creating, and that at a certain point in that eter- 
nity it began to create ? It is not easy to think 
so. If it was good to create at any definite time 
it must have been good to create at any previous 
time, and what was good would have been done. 
It would seem likely that it would always create. 
And I might also say just as well that if it was 
good to create a stellar system in one portion of 
space, it would be good to create elsewhere. 
Apart from the inexplicable puzzle of a past eter- 
nity of time, w T hich we cannot deny except by as- 
serting a relativity of time tantamount to denying 
that there is any such thing as time, we can only 
say that the universe now exists, in time, and that 
its existence is not automatic, but depends on the 
force of some cause essentially antecedent to it, 
but whether antecedent in time, or only logically 
antecedent, as the rising sun is antecedent to the 
dawn, we cannot say. It may be that inasmuch 
as a great creative cause has existed from all eter- 
nity, it must have also acted creatively from all 
eternity. In that case we might properly con- 
ceive of the universe, not in its present transitory 
and cyclical condition, but in some form as eter- 
nal, as eternal as its great Cause. 



CHAPTER VII 
A UNIVERSE FITTED FOR LIFE 

ET us now return for a little space to our own 
world, the earth, and ask a further question 
as to its composition as bearing on its adap- 
tation for the residence of man, the lower animals, 
and plant life. 

A world without beings to use it would not be 
worth while. It needs vegetable and animal life 
to make it useful. At any rate, we know it is 
useful because it supports such life. To be sure, 
we do not know that Venus and Mars have in- 
habitants. Very likely they have, for they have 
air and water. The moon has none, nor probably 
Jupiter and Saturn, and certainly not the sun. 
Yet planets that have none are of some value to 
us, and seem to be in preparation for the time 
when they may possibly be inhabited. But if not, 
they are yet not useless to us, and the sun is our 
mighty servant, the steward of all our life. While 
I presume there are innumerable inhabited worlds, 
yet if the earth were the only one the service to 
us on this Httle world of all the radiant heavens 
would not be unworthy, for I believe that an 

75 



76 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

infant's single will is of more value than the sum 
of all cosmic forces through all the celestial ages, 
so much is mind superior to matter. The question 
of the composition of our world as related to the 
uses of man then deserves consideration. 

The fact is, that the world — earth, sea, and air 
— is made out of materials that fit it most nicely 
to the life of man, animals, and plants; or shall 
we say that our world of life has been evolved 
to fit the physical conditions that the earth pre- 
sents ? 

The present actual composition of our world, 
its air, soil and seas, is one out of a countless num- 
ber of permutations of elements, whether in their 
relative amount or in their presence or absence, 
which are conceivable, and of which only the 
present one would support such life as we see. A 
million others would be fatal. We may properly 
ask whether under other conditions evolution 
could possibly support life. 

The earth might have been made all out of 
gold or silver or iron. Then there could have 
been no life. Or if we had all the present ingredi- 
ents which we find necessary for life, carbon, lime, 
clay, nitrogen and all the rest, but only oxygen 
and hydrogen, or either alone missing, we cannot 
conceive how life could exist. 

Of the many ingredients needed to maintain 
life as we see it here, I may take three as represent- 
ing the rest, air, water, and carbonic acid. They 



A UNIVERSE FITTED FOR LIFE 77 

are exquisitely fitted to support life, unless life 
has been so developed as to make use of them. 
Could physical life have existed without them? 
Imagine the absence of water which fills the oceans 
and soaks the land, and constitutes the chief in- 
gredient in both animal and vegetable life. No 
other liquid — and chemists know them — could 
take its place as the vehicle of life. Suppose there 
were no water, or think of any other liquid, sul- 
phuric acid, mercury, alcohol, chloroform taking 
its place — not one of them has the neutral quality 
with the power of dissolving other substances in 
sap or blood. The fact is that no known liquid 
but water could sustain life. Then the great 
abundance of water gives a stability of tempera- 
ture necessary for life, through its extraordinarily 
high specific heat. Its evaporation prevents sud- 
den, destructive changes from heat to cold, ab- 
sorbing heat in evaporation, and giving it out 
again in liquefying as cloud or rain, and in freez- 
ing; otherwise the earth would be uninhabitable. 
Water is needed for life, and is fitted and pro- 
vided for it. 

Equally we cannot imagine life without air. In 
a vacuum it could not exist. No other gas or 
combination of gases would do. Just its proper- 
ties are needed to draw up and support the evap- 
orated water and give rain to the earth. The air 
is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, with a little 
carbonic acid which is poisonous in large quan- 



78 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

titles, but harmless in small quantities. How 
happened nature to supply oxygen and nitrogen ? 
Why not all nitrogen instead of four-fifths ? 
There are many other gases, but not one that will 
support animal life except oxygen. Is it not ex- 
traordinary that just this gas should have been 
provided in the air, and in just the right dilution ? 
No other would do. But may we suppose that 
if other gases had filled the place of air some other 
form of life than ours would have been developed, 
quite unlike ours ? Certainly nothing made of 
flesh and blood. For we know these other gases. 
We know that life cannot and could not be sup- 
ported in an atmosphere of pure nitrogen, which 
is too inert to form the necessary combinations. 
Suppose it were all chlorine or fluorine gas: it 
would consume everything living; or nitrous oxid 
or ammonia, or any other gas that can be men- 
tioned, say helium or argon. Any one would be 
fatal to any form of life. Could there be living 
bodies not of such flesh and blood as ours that 
might have originated by evolution in a world of 
some other sort of air ? It appears impossible. 
Other worlds have the same sort of chemistry as 
ours; and we know the gases and the solids as 
well, and they cannot cause growth. They can 
create crystals by the superficial deposit of layer 
on layer, but not vital growth. Only the immate- 
rial could live, what we call a soul. The surprising 
fitness of this one mixture in air of oxygen and 



A UNIVERSE FITTED FOR LIFE 79 

nitrogen for life is a fact which suggests intelligent 
purpose in fitting the world for life. 

Carbonic acid, borne by the air and the water, 
is the third condition of life of which I would 
speak. It, too, has a special fitness for its place. 
Life fits itself to it, as it does to air and water; 
but it is equally true that they are primordially 
fixed in a fitness for it, as the hand to the glove, 
as well as the glove to the hand. Carbonic acid 
is everywhere in air and water, and supplies the 
substance of all plants, which retain its carbon 
and give off its oxygen, just as animals keep the 
balance by taking the oxygen and giving off car- 
bonic acid. It is not easy to conceive of any 
form of vegetable life dependent on any other 
element than the carbon of carbonic acid. We 
have heard of living skeletons, but a body made 
up of bones could hardly live. 

Can it be supposed that these three necessities 
for any form of bodily life, water, air, and carbonic 
acid — and many others might be mentioned — 
could have met together by accident, without 
purpose? Professor L. J. Henderson, of Har- 
vard University, says that there is not one chance 
in millions of millions that the many qualities 
and unique properties possessed by water and 
carbonic acid which occur thus simultaneously in 
their elements, could have met, except through 
the operation of a natural law that connects them, 
whether called impetus, or natural theology, or 



8o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

teleological purpose. To me all this amazing fit- 
ness seems most easily explicable on the assump- 
tion of a purposive Being antecedent to all matter 
and all physical law. 






CHAPTER VIII 

THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 

IN previous chapters I have aimed to make it 
clear that our physical universe, whether 
looked at in its minutest atoms or in its total 
starry systems, gives clear evidence that it is not 
self-existent, but had an external source. Noth- 
ing exists by its own necessity, and nothing by 
chance. Some superior power is the source of 
physical matter and of physical laws. I now turn 
to that other and higher world of life, and ask 
what evidence it has to offer as to its origin. Do 
the familiar laws of chemistry and physics account 
for the first beginnings of life and for its develop- 
ment in the vegetable and animal worlds ? In 
this discussion simply vital activities will be con- 
sidered ; the mental activities embraced in reason, 
instinct, and will are reserved for later treatment. 
Living matter differs from inorganic matter in 
that it has a more complex structure, and in that 
it grows under new laws. It is made out of a 
few of the same chemical atoms, but chiefly of 
four of them, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and 
nitrogen; but these appear in much more intri- 
cate combinations than those dealt with in inor- 

81 



82 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

ganic chemistry. Thus ammonia, an inorganic 
compound, has a composition expressed by NH 3 , 
four atoms, while haemoglobin, an organic con- 
stituent of the blood has, according to Preyer, the 
formula CeooHgeoNiwFeiSaOiyg, a total of 1894 
atoms. Living matter also has the power of 
growth, not possessed by inorganic matter. It 
is not growth when a crystal of alum is enlarged 
by depositing layer on layer on the outside of it; 
but the plant or the animal grows by taking food 
within itself, and then changing it into vitalized 
matter. This requires new laws, while at the 
same time the physical laws continue in full force. 
But it may be said, and has been said by many 
biologists, that there is no basal difference be- 
tween purely physical forces and vital forces, that 
no definite line of demarcation can be drawn be- 
tween them; that products once called vital are 
now formed by chemical synthesis. True, there 
are such products of vital action, crystalline in 
nature, like the alizarine of indigo. They are by- 
products of vital action, not themselves vital, in- 
capable of growth, thrown off in the process of 
growth. The chemist may make them, but no 
master of the test-tube and balance has yet learned 
how to synthesize the ovum of a king-crab, or the 
prothallus of a clinging lichen, or even a single 
living, growing cell of which they are composed. 
Nature and science know the difference between 
the forces, equally but differently forceful, of 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 83 

purely physical matter and of living matter. The 
one is dead, though its atoms are always in mo- 
tion; the other has life and the characteristic 
evolutions of life. 

This is a very serious and important distinc- 
tion. And yet it is clear and must be recognized 
that every product of life is created under the 
control of chemical and physical laws. Herein 
lies the strength of the materialistic argument. 
The biologist's business is to observe growth and 
development, and he sees everything obedient to 
and accountable to known physical laws. Every 
change in a cell, every evolution in an egg, every 
conformation and transformation can be explained; 
everything except the directive impulse. Every 
chemical change in the composition of the grow- 
ing seed, from starch into dextrine or woody fibre, 
follows physical law, is measurable and consonant ; 
but no physical law will require the leaves of a 
seed to sprout upward and its roots to go down- 
ward. The directive forces of life use physical 
laws in everything, but as servitors ; the directive 
force of life is behind. 

I am compelled to believe that there is some- 
thing more in life than the mere forces of chemis- 
try and physics. Those forces can explain a star, 
but not a rose. The chemist and physicist can 
follow and explain everything — how the sap rises 
under osmotic law, the oxygenation of the blood, 
its traverse to and from the heart — everything 



84 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

except just one thing, namely, what is the initial 
impulse that sets their familiar laws at work in a 
way so different, so superior to anything that those 
laws can do apart from life. Life stops, and those 
laws no longer in subjection act in their own free 
way, and the matter organized under life disor- 
ganizes in decay. It is the guidance, the direc- 
tion, so palpable to create a plant, a bird, a man, 
which physics cannot explain. 

It is of the very essence of life that it gives 
guidance, is purposive. This separates it from 
mere physical forces, such as the attraction of 
chemism. It has a previsioned end to achieve. 
It aims to create a tree, a man, then to keep them 
repairing themselves or growing to an ideal per- 
fection. Out of the common sap the atoms dis- 
tribute themselves after a preconceived scheme 
to organize into bark, wood, leaves, petals, stamens, 
pistils, seeds, just as we knew the}' would when we 
planted the peach-stone. That is very purpose- 
ful life. Life chooses, sorts, selects, directs, sees, 
and reaches a distant aim. Whence comes this 
outreaching, selective, directive power ? 

The mere biologist does not try to answer this 
question. He is content to see it, to state its 
laws and give names to the usual processes of life, 
and then he too often thinks that the naming of 
the law is an explanation of its force. An apple 
falls to the ground. We ask Why ? and we are 
told that the attraction of the earth draws it. 
Attraction is a Latin word that means drawing; 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 85 

and so we are told that drawing draws it; and so 
we have got nowhere. We have simply given a 
general name to a familiar fact; but the reason 
why the apple falls to the earth we have not 
learned. So vitalism, or vital force, is but a name 
we give to an observed order of processes, and, 
put into English, it means nothing more than life. 
It explains nothing. Its marked character is its 
foresight. This prevision is everywhere, in the 
egg, in the chick, in the bird, and no biologist 
can explain, he can only describe the process. 
The latest biologists are coming to see that 
physics cannot account for life, which is a new and 
added directive principle. Says the distinguished 
Doctor Anton Kerner in his "Natural History of 
Plants," as quoted by A. R. Wallace: 

I do not hesitate to designate as "vital force" this 
natural agency, not to be identified with any other, 
whose immediate instrument is protoplasm, and whose 
peculiar effects we call life. The atoms and molecules of 
protoplasm perform the functions which we call life only 
so long as they are swayed by this vital principle. If its 
dominion ceases they yield to the operation of other forces. 
The recognition of a special natural force of this kind is not 
inconsistent with the fact that living bodies may at the 
same time be subject to other natural forces. 

Again he says, speaking of the wonderful proc- 
esses connected with chlorophyll: 

What is altogether puzzling is, how the active forces 
work, how the sun's rays are able to bring it about that 
the atoms of the raw material abandon their previous 
grouping, become displaced, intermix one with another, 



86 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

and shortly reappear in stable combinations under a 
wholly different arrangement. It is the more difficult 
to gain a clear idea of these processes because it is not a 
question of that displacement of atoms called decomposi- 
tion, but as to that process which is known as combina- 
tion, or synthesis. 

This directive and selective force which we 
call life appears to be outside of and above the 
laws of inorganic nature. Physical nature has 
no such power. We know molecules drawn to- 
gether into geometrical forms under mechanical 
forces which we do in a measure understand. 
But in those forms there is no such synthesis. 
We cannot imagine such blind and purposeless 
forces performing such purposeful combinations 
as are necessary to restore the lost leg of a lizard, 
or to create buds and send out suckers from the 
spot where the bark of the tree is bruised. Haeckel 
saw the difficulty and tried to explain it in a 
meaningless way. He postulated will in the form 
of an unconscious directive force lodged in every 
atom, its unconscious soul. But that is so ut- 
terly void of evidence and so utterly contradicts 
the universal sense of the race that we must dis- 
miss it. It is easier, instead of distributing an 
imaginary rudimentary mind to all the atoms of 
the earth and of all worlds, it is far easier to con- 
ceive of a really intelligent Mind that guides and 
directs the purposeful forces and selective move- 
ments in all the forms of growth and life. 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 87 

If I understand Bergson aright he avoids com- 
mitting himself to the recognition of such a 
supreme spiritual power, and tells us that there 
is in nature, at least in organic nature, in all its 
parts and from its beginning, a universal, pri- 
mordial consciousness, a sort of undirected, pur- 
poseless yearning, reaching out after activity of 
whatever sort. It has no definite aim beyond 
movement in any direction whatever in which it 
is not met and hampered by inert matter. In its 
resistance to that hindrance of matter it finds 
some happy accidents and achieves some victories 
over matter which give it new forms and powers. 
If I understand Metchnikoff , his position is much 
the same, and to original inorganic matter he 
gives a sort of vital power. What they fail to tell 
us is how life first got its first restlessness of energy, 
added to that of the material out of which it was 
made. That there is any such primordial con- 
sciousness, any such embryonic volition in inor- 
ganic matter, or organic matter either, we have 
not the slightest evidence. Such inorganic mat- 
ter is the very slave of law. It never resists the 
laws of physics. It shows no will. Nor do we 
see any sign of will in vegetable life, not even in 
the leaf that turns to the sun, nor in the stamen 
of the barberry blossom that strikes the stigma 
when the leg of a bee touches it. We do find it 
in animal life. The animal has volition, and 
therein has a new power; but that opens a new 



88 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

field that needs consideration later. In all veg- 
etable life, and in the constant re-creation of the 
body of animals and man, from the ovum to the 
birth, there is no sign of the lowest grade of will. 
The activities seem to be those simply of vital 
mechanism, acting surely, with all the certainty 
of the highest intelligence, but quite unconsciously 
and non-volitionally. We can go no further. 
To assume volition where none appears is arbi- 
trary and illegitimate. There is teleologic activity, 
everything tending to its end, but all the activity 
is fixed and hardened into regulated law. But 
law is not force, has no force, is merely the state- 
ment of what some force which we do not under- 
stand but which we call vital force does. If a 
God is not otherwise excluded it seems to me 
reasonable to conclude that this force comes from 
God. 

If the powers of life are so utterly different from 
and superior to those of inorganic matter, one is 
forced to ask how dead matter came to get life. 
Physical forces can give us a diamond, a mud- 
bank or a star; vital forces can give us a lichen, 
an oak, a star-fish, and a man. Physical forces 
began to act we do not know how many myriads 
of eons ago; whether with the origin of the neb- 
ulous swarm out of which our solar system started, 
or how much further back in the first of the pos- 
sible succession of repeated cosmic evolutions 
under which worlds exist. We only know that 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 89 

as long as there has been matter in any form its 
material laws have been in force. But vital force 
had a beginning in a vastly later time, after the 
deposition of the Archean rocks and the quieting 
down of the boiling oceans. How happened it 
that this new sort of force was added to the old ? 
We cannot see that there was any tendency in 
the chemical forces themselves to develop into 
vital forces. Thus far chemists have been utterly 
unable to persuade chemism to blossom into life. 
Every possible way that ingenuity could devise 
has been tried in vain. I cannot deny that it 
may be achieved, but thus far the strong evidence 
is against it. The only present argument for the 
production of life out of physical laws rests in the 
inability or unwillingness to allow that any supe- 
rior Power could have had a part in the rule of 
the universe. Life had a beginning on the earth 
after it had cooled down enough to allow life to 
exist. Some have conjectured that life began 
here by being brought on meteoric dust or stones. 
So far as we can know, all such matter, coming at 
an enormous velocity, is raised on meeting the air 
to a heat that would destroy all life. But even if 
fine dust could escape incandescence, that would 
only throw the question back to the world from 
which the life was brought. That solution may 
be dismissed. Life is not a necessary phase of 
matter; it had a beginning, had a cause — a cause, 
as it appears after immense investigation, not in 



go WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

physical law but from some other source. We 
cannot well conceive of any such source other 
than that which by a crude process of reason the 
earliest races and religions have settled upon. 
If physical nature is not self -existent, had a Cause, 
equally the world of life, by its very origin in time, 
suggests such a superior, self -existent Cause. 

We must suppose that organic life began on the 
earth as a cell of protoplasm. But what is a cell ? 
It is a composite of such infinite complexity com- 
posed of so many atoms, so specially arranged, 
and possessed of such extraordinary powers, that 
it seems incredible that any ordinary chemical 
attractions should by any happy accident have 
produced it. It is made up of carbonaceous and 
proteid components, vastly more complex than 
any inorganic substance which either nature's 
laboratory or that of man can create. Then 
think of its powers, so utterly unlike those of 
chemism. It can take in outer inorganic matter, 
assimilate it, enlarge, and then subdivide itself. 
That is, it can grow. It duplicates its nucleus and 
breaks in two. 

We can compare the growth of the cell with 
the nearest parallel we have in inorganic nature, 
the creation of a crystal, with its twinning, or its 
aggregation of crystals, and the smaller, often very 
minute ones on the surface of a larger one giving 
it a drusy quality. But the parallel is only super- 
ficial. In a crystal of quartz or alum or sugar 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 91 

the molecule has a definite form, possesses definite, 
fixed polar attractions which give the crystal its 
definite shape, as each molecule attracts the next 
to its predestined place, each molecule being of a 
limited number of atoms. Thus the quartz 
crystal is silicon dioxide, Si0 2 , having thus three 
atoms. Sugar has the formula, C^H^On, forty- 
five atoms. Each molecule attracts another just 
like it, and this again another, and each falls into 
the place which its polar attraction requires, thus 
getting a definite geometric shape. Two crystals 
can in their formation interfere with each other 
and form a twin crystal, or small crystals can be 
deposited on a large one; but in each case it is 
mere superficial aggregation, like added to like 
on the surface, by a very simple law of crystalliza- 
tion easily explained. 

Very different is the case with organic life. A 
cell is the beginning of an organism, but it is ex- 
cessively composite. It is made up of an envelope, 
with a nucleus, and filled with protoplasm. The 
cells differ, but they are all composed of hundreds 
or thousands of atoms in each molecule of proto- 
plasm. Then it grows not by deposition from 
without, but by absorption followed by division 
from within, the very reverse process from that 
of the crystal. It feeds itself from without, ab- 
sorbing its nutriment within itself, until it is 
ready to divide. And it has the remarkable selec- 
tive, directive power of developing from the cen- 



92 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

tral cell of the ovum into a fish or a bird or a man. 
The processes of growth are utterly different in 
the organism from what they are in the crystal, 
the movements of life absolutely diverse from 
those of chemical attraction, and the products 
are as different, one a stone, the other a man. 
Life takes lifeless matter, dissolves it, recreates 
it, overcomes it, subverts its laws and gives to 
its products a continuous self -productive, recrea- 
tive, procreative, permanent force, utterly diverse 
from the inertness of the immobile products of 
chemism. Such a new world of life, not to be ex- 
plained by physical law, suggests a Power outside 
of the physical which at the critical time intro- 
duced it into the world and gave it its extraor- 
dinary qualities. 

There is only one world of inorganic matter and 
law, but there are two worlds of life, vegetable 
and animal. First came vegetable life, which 
takes inorganic matter and makes it organic; 
next came animal life, which must seek as its 
nutriment matter already organized. If it be a 
fact that vegetable life had its beginning in time 
upon the earth, originating here, and all efforts 
at securing spontaneous generation under the 
most hopeful conditions have thus far failed of 
success, the same is true of animal life. At some 
time, and in its lowest forms, animal life began 
to appear upon the earth, at a time subsequent 
to the appearance of vegetable life, on which it 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 93 

fed. It was very different in its chemical struc- 
ture, in the assimilation of its aliment, and in its 
development. One produces a fixed tree, the 
other a free-moving man. It is thus a new world 
of life, so that we now have two worlds of life, 
organized on separate types, these two and no 
more. They originate here, and in time, and suc- 
cessively. We might imagine a primordial cell 
with an accidental life impulse that might indif- 
ferently produce both vegetable and animal life, 
but so far as we can tell from geological history, 
and from the necessities of the case, the vegetable 
impulse was the first, and the animal came later. 
Why should it not have continued developing 
vegetable life ? It would seem as if the introduc- 
tion of a new and different system of life required 
interposition from without. Each of the two 
worlds of life has its own peculiar impulse, one 
producing the rose, the palm, the oak, and the 
other the shell, the bird, the man. To me it does 
not seem probable that these two systems have 
originated their own separate impulses, their own 
directive aims, to produce one wood, the other 
flesh and bone ; the one to develop into the forest 
of oaks, the other into eagles and lions, and all 
out of the same forces that create the crystal. 
There is as yet no evidence to support the suppo- 
sition. If we cannot absolutely deny that such 
may be the case, the suggestion yet seems plausi- 
ble that some exterior power started the two new 




94 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

streams of force and life; and the suggestion 
seems more than plausible unless we begin by the 
blank assumption that no such exterior power as 
we call God can exist. One may question and 
doubt about God, but how deny ? 

It is the selective and directive power of life 
that needs to be accounted for, which takes the 
same identical material and sends it on errands 
in different directions to do utterly different crea- 
tive work. It is a comparatively easy task for 
biologists to describe the process of growth in an 
animal or plant, how from the germ in the ovule 
or ovum one change follows another until the cell, 
perhaps too small to be seen without a microscope, 
becomes the elephant or the oak. That satisfies 
and has to satisfy the botanist or zoologist. He 
can describe the process by which the contents of 
the egg segregate and separate until the chick is 
ready full-formed to escape from the shell; or 
how from the seed the radicle digs downward and 
the plumule mounts upward, and then how leaf 
succeeds leaf, and branches follow, and flowers, and 
fruit. But by what force or for what reason all 
this purposive reorganization takes place he can- 
not tell us, and he usually forgets even to wonder 
at the mysterious commonplace which it is not 
his business to understand. Because he knows 
that no ordinary chemical reactions can explain 
it, he calls it vital force, life. I insist that this 
force, so absolutely and teleologically selective, 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 95 

which out of one sap or one blood directs its ele- 
ments to go each to its own place and create so 
many different sorts of things, leaf, bark, wood, 
gum, oil, starch; or muscle, bone, hair, nails, skin 
—this selective force we cannot at all explain, 
any more than we can imitate the least of it, not 
a scale on the down of a butterfly's wing with our 
best skill in our best-furnished laboratories; and 
so we give it a name and call it life, and then are 
likely to think we understand it because we have 
given it an empty name. We observe all the 
phenomena of nutrition, assimilation, and growth, 
and then take them for granted, and forget to 
wonder why all the chemical atoms, oxygen, hy- 
drogen, nitrogen, carbon, lime, manage to get 
drawn into just the right places to develop the 
cells wanted, and at just the right time. Ordinary 
chemical and mechanical processes cannot explain 
all this. They can do their part as long as life 
is present to direct them, but when life ends, 
although the plant or animal remains the same, 
the ordinary chemical and mechanical reactions 
assert themselves, and what was evolved under 
life is dissolved and decays. All the time there is 
an end in view, a new organism to be created, just 
as truly anticipated and worked for as when a 
man makes a mallet or builds a house. Nothing 
less does the egg do when it makes a chicken, or 
the blood when it repairs a broken bone. I say 
as Professor Anton Kerner has said before, that 



96 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

this is no operation of ordinary chemistry, that it 
works only so long as the molecules of protoplasm 
are swayed by what we call the vital principle, 
but as soon as that is lost the same protoplasm 
can do nothing but fall under the forces of com- 
mon chemical action. There are, so far as I see, 
only two possible theories for the origination and 
development of vegetable and animal life on the 
earth, one by the undirected, accidental attrac- 
tions and repulsions somehow possessed by the 
ultimate electrons of matter, and the other by 
the purposed guidance and direction of a superior, 
self -existent intelligence. To my mind the latter 
seems the more reasonable and likely. 



CHAPTER IX 

FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 

IN the present chapter I would ask the reader 
to consider some of the phases of evolution 
which seem to indicate foresight in preparing 
for processes or functions before they come into 
use, and therefore appear to indicate intelligent 
design. 

Since the acceptance of the principle of evolu- 
tion the question is no longer that of the Bridge- 
water Treatises, Does this or that organ, so per- 
fectly adapted to human or other use thereby 
show evidence of design ? but it is rather this : 
Could the blind and miscellaneous processes of 
variation ever actually have produced, without 
guidance, this or that organ or world ? What we 
are in search of in this study is to discover whether 
there is such a thing as directive evolution, evolu- 
tion not merely reaching out at haphazard and 
on every side, and then conserving its happenings 
when they become useful, but rather evolution 
also guided, directed by a master of nature. We 
are liable to err in our observations, and also to 
be prejudiced by our beliefs or disbeliefs ; but there 
may yet be some test principles which we may 
apply for our guidance. 

97 



98 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Under the laws of evolution we can conceive 
an organ or organism, belonging to an animal or 
plant, to be immediately useful as soon as it be- 
gins to appear in a slight degree; and then it is 
easy to believe that its survival value will lead to 
its further development until it becomes an im- 
portant feature, of the species. That is plain 
evolution. But if there is a considerable period 
in the development of an organ during which it 
is not of use, but requires to be perfected, this will 
then appear to be a directive evolution, one that 
anticipates an end not yet reached, and which 
seems to imply some exterior and designing in- 
telligence. In the field of life we may properly 
apply this test and its evidence will be of value. 
Such evidence there appears to be. 

I will not here stop to dwell on the fact already 
referred to that every vital process has a forward 
look, that every drop of blood or sap, and every 
constituent of egg or seed moves to achieve a 
future end, just as in the body the phagocytes 
gather and proceed to absorb and destroy worn- 
out cells. I would here consider some more 
special examples of development which antici- 
pate some useful end to come later. 

Vegetable life anticipated animal life. Vegeta- 
ble life does not need animal life ; it can live alone. 
But animal life must have vegetable life to sub- 
sist upon; so vegetable life prepared the way for 
it. Animal life came into existence in the life 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 99 

history of the world just as fast as plant life was 
ready for it. The enormous browsing animals of 
the Tertiary Period followed enormous plant de- 
velopment; and then, that they might not over- 
run the earth, but be properly reduced in numbers, 
there appeared the monster sabre-toothed lions 
and tigers, which happily became extinct when 
unarmed naked man appeared defenseless, except 
in his superior intelligence. All this fitting of 
time to time, animal to vegetable life, and the suc- 
cessive forms of animal life, each appearing in just 
the right succession of time, seems to suggest 
some directive impulse. 

Not only does the order of the appearance on 
the earth of the successive forms of life suggest a 
forward anticipatory look and purpose, but we 
seem to observe the same thing when we consider 
the production of the parts and organs of the liv- 
ing body. The old argument for creationism 
drawn from the eye treated it simply as a mech- 
anism, a wonderfully complicated and accurate 
mechanism, something far beyond what human 
intelligence could have planned, and it asked 
whether it must not have had an omniscient con- 
triver. But evolution replied that sensitiveness 
to light began in the formless amoeba, which has 
no differentiated nervous system whatever, that in 
the course of division and reproduction a certain 
portion of the structure became somewhat sen- 
sitive to light, and that there was produced in the 



ioo WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

infusorian a pigment spot which was more sensi- 
tive than other parts. Then by slow degrees, 
through accidental favorable modifications of 
many generations, one improvement after another 
happened to be added, until at last we have the 
eye of the vertebrates, with all its marvellously 
accurate complexity of adaptation for the purpose 
of vision. But does not this put too much on the 
unpurposed action of evolution ? The eye is an 
instrument composed of parts co-ordinated to each 
other. No one is of any advantage without all 
the others. The retina needs a crystalline lens 
to focus a picture upon it. The appearance of 
an imperfect lump of stiffer transparent fluid, the 
beginning of a crystalline lens, may be conceived 
to be of some advantage; but not unless at the 
same time, and in the same individual, there were 
a corresponding improvement in the constitution 
of the retina with its rods and cones fitted to re- 
ceive and define the very imperfect image cast 
by the gelatinous lump not yet a crystalline lens. 
Every improvement in the lens requires in the 
same individual a parallel improvement in the 
retina. The two must coincide to be of any 
added advantage and be transmitted. But there 
is no likelihood that they will coincide by any 
happy accident. Just so with the other parts of 
the eye, the aqueous humor, the cornea, the iris; 
the evolution must be progressive, representing 
co-ordinate changes in all the parts, each follow- 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 101 

ing the other, for any one change in a single part 
must be met by changes in all the other parts; 
otherwise there will be confusion rather than im- 
proved vision. This co-ordination is not to be 
expected in a single individual. Under the law of 
chances that is too much to ask. If the changes 
do occur simultaneously by a succession of those 
leaps which is called mutation, that makes it all 
the more evident that some guiding hand has 
directed it. The appearance is of design, a pre- 
arranged evolution of the eye. 

But let us follow Bergson in going a little 
further than this. I have spoken of the verte- 
brate eye, that of the fish, the reptile, the bird, 
the mammal, and man. It is all one sort of eye, 
which may be conceived, if you please, as being the 
product of unpurposed evolution. But the mol- 
lusca have to all purpose the same eye. We may 
suppose the vertebrate eye to have followed in its 
creation a single line of evolution, and that the 
eye happened so early in the progress of the verte- 
brate from the primitive amphioxus to become 
fixed in its mechanism, that all vertebrate eyes, 
those of fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals have 
the same structure. But how about the eye of 
the mollusk? The mollusk and the vertebrate 
separated, in the division of life, long before the 
eye began to be evolved. Mollusks and verte- 
brates are built on utterly different plans, and yet 
they have very much the same sort of eye, but 



io2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

with a different origin of growth. The verte- 
brate's eye grows out of the brain, but the mol- 
lusk's eye, the same fashion of eye, grows out of 
the ectoderm, or outer covering. How does this 
happen ? Here is a coincidence not easy to ex- 
plain. This is not the only kind of eye possible 
or conceivable. Flies have a different eye with a 
multitude of lenses. The coincidence of the ver- 
tebrate eye with that of the mollusk is most ex- 
traordinary, not easy to explain on any theory of 
unpurposed evolution from accidental variations. 
Then one thing more is to be considered as 
brought out by Bergson. The eye has its own 
separate source of growth in the fetus. It begins 
from the brain as its special root, as it does from 
the ectoderm in the mollusk. But in certain 
salamanders the eye can be removed, when it will 
regenerate itself from its normal root. But take 
away that root, and it will regenerate itself from 
another and yet another root. What has this to 
do with evolution? Does it not indeed contra- 
dict the law of evolution ? For here the eye comes 
out of a structure other than that from which in 
the course of evolution it has been derived. It 
would seem as if there were a purpose in the re- 
generative growth of the system which looks for- 
ward to the end and jumps athwart the course of 
evolution. There is something directive and dis- 
tinctly telic about it, something that suggests a 
divine superintendence. 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 103 

Another very remarkable case in which in na- 
ture provision is made for a function before it is 
ready to be exercised appears in bisexualism, 
and that too appears in both animals and plants. 
In the lower organisms there is no sex, and repro- 
duction is by fission. A cell, and equally the 
lower types, divide into two individuals. It 
would seem as if Nature would continue this 
method for the succession of life. And so indeed 
it does; for not only can nearly all plants be re- 
produced by buds or slips, but the lowest forms 
of animal life still use only the method of fission, 
while others reproduce themselves in part by 
parthenogenesis. But in the larger part of both 
the vegetable and animal world an intermediate 
step is introduced, that of bisexualism. Doubt- 
less this is of great advantage in multiplying the 
chances for variation in the offspring, and thus 
for the advance of evolution. But is it not ex- 
traordinary that these two great kingdoms of life, 
animals and plants, so diverse from the beginning, 
should have forsaken reproduction by fission, and 
should have happened to hit upon this same sex- 
ual method of securing progeny, so that in most 
species of animals, if not of plants, there are none 
produced that are not the product of sex-union ? 
Yet this is not essential, nor is it the primitive 
and natural way, which is by division. In not 
a few forms of life which propagate by sex-union 
parthenogenesis can be continued for several gen- 



io 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

erations. In plants reproduction by division is 
familiar to all of us. The buds at the axil of 
every leaf of the tiger-lily drop off and produce 
fresh plants with no sexual union. Even more 
familiar to everybody is the reproduction of 
select varieties of plants and trees by slips or 
grafts or tubers. The potato, the tulip, the Con- 
cord grape, the Baldwin apple are examples. 
Any green twig of willow stuck in the ground will 
grow a tree. But this primitive and simplest 
method of propagation does not prevail. We see 
no reason why it should not have done so. It 
allows sports, new varieties, though less freely 
than is gained by sex-union. It has been replaced 
in both the animal and the vegetable kingdom. 
It would look as if there were some governing 
general design which chose this method of repro- 
duction as best for the development of both 
vegetable and animal life. It looks like purpo- 
sive foresight. 

And all the more because the origin of bisexu- 
ality would seem of necessity to have antedated 
its use. There could not have been union of the 
two sexes before there were sexes. It would seem 
as if the purpose to have sexes must have pre- 
ceded the appearance of the two. Doubtless the 
differentiation of the sexes was itself an evolution 
as it progressed, but in its beginnings it must have 
started before its purpose could be achieved; 
and so its course and beginning were directive, 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 105 

but not self-directive. It appears as if an out- 
side intelligence had planned it as a new method 
of life, and had then imposed it equally on both 
the animal and the vegetable kingdom. 

The very appearance of bisexualism in either 
plants or animals, and much more in both, is a 
strange phenomenon. As already said, reproduc- 
tion by division is the natural and simple way, 
while that by sex-union is new and complicated. 
In the plant it requires the creation of new organs, 
stamen, and pistil, creating the flower not before 
needed. And the two sex organs must be created 
before fertilization can take place. That is, they 
have come in anticipation of a new order of things 
not yet inaugurated. That means foresight, such 
as a plant does not have. The foresight must 
have been in some superior intelligence. The 
case is similar in the animal kingdom, but with 
this addition, that no longer is the sexual union 
unconscious and involuntary, brought about by 
winds or insects, but is the result of a physical 
pasvsion or instinct. Nature creates this passion, 
for the sake of progeny, but the animal knows no 
more that it is necessary to preserve the race 
than do the stamen and pistil, the insect and the 
wind that fertilize the blossom. There are tribes 
in Australia equally ignorant. It is not man or 
the animal or the plant that has related the sex- 
ual act to propagation of the species. It achieves 
its end, but utterly unconsciously, without pur- 



106 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

pose. But there is an end and a purpose which 
must reside somewhere, somewhere else than in 
the plant or animal. 

Thus at the beginning reproduction by division 
held the field. Evolution moved that way. But 
an absolutely different plan broke out, needed 
for higher evolution, for another purpose not 
needed by bare nature, but needed by anticipation 
for the creation of superior forms of life and for 
man. The earlier method had been to make two 
out of one. The new method was to make one 
out of two. It was an absolute break from the 
path of evolution needed and introduced for an 
important distant purpose, that of progeny. It 
has the appearance of being anticipatory, pros- 
pective, purposive, and therefore the work of a 
superior intelligent being. 

These two cases of the eye and sex are but illus- 
trations of the anticipative appearance of organs 
and structures that prepare the way for subse- 
quent uses. It is a rule of nature. One may say 
that because the eye happens to develop in that 
way we see, or because sex by accident comes to 
be therefore propagation takes the new direction; 
but to me it appears more reasonable to conclude 
that because sight is needed therefore the eye 
comes into being to prepare the way for sight, 
and that the distinction of sex came first to pro- 
vide for a better way by which both animals and 
plants would advance to speedier heights in ev- 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 107 

olution through mutations under Mendelian law. 
Equally it would appear to me that when life 
began in the water, and fishes, breathing by gills, 
began to develop into reptiles living on land as 
well as in water, their possession of rudimentary 
lungs, which prepared the way for the change, in- 
dicated that the change of structure was made for 
a purpose. Why should a gill-breathing aquatic 
animal ever begin to get lungs, except because in 
some future form of life it would need them? 
Take the mudfish, Necturus maculosus, which has 
gills, lives in the water, but also has rudimentary 
lungs which it can slightly use. They seem to 
prepare and provide, in the imperfect lungs which 
they do not need, for the necessities of their air- 
breathing descendants. The fish must become a 
reptile, a land animal, drop its gills and take lungs; 
or in its individual life the tadpole must become 
a frog. 

Another case of that directive evolution which 
anticipates in one form of life what will be neces- 
sary in a subsequent one appears in the common 
butterfly. It presents an extraordinary life his- 
tory. The butterfly lays an egg which hatches 
into a worm utterly different from the parent. It 
feeds voraciously, grows rapidly, and then drops 
its skin, creates a new harder one, and becomes a 
chrysalis. Now observe the change. All the 
parts and organs of the old ugly worm dissolve 
into a homogeneous pulp, which contains no or- 



io8 } WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

gans whatever. The old nervous and muscular 
system is all gone. Then there begins to form 
out of this pulp, as a chicken forms out of an egg, 
an utterly new creature, a gorgeous butterfly with 
wings that sucks honey from flowers. Every 
change was an anticipative one, the chrysalis for 
the butterfly; the old structure dissolved, not for 
its own sake, but because it was necessary to de- 
stroy the old so that life might begin all over 
again. This does not look like the work of sim- 
t)le evolution, but of an artist planner. 

Parallel cases are numerous in which adapta- 
tion appears that could not have teen caused by 
the happy accumulation of accidental variations. 
Several are mentioned by T. H. Morgan. He 
cites insects which show curiously close adjust- 
ment of the sexes, in which the fittings vary from 
species to species; the occurrence of offensive 
odors or poisons; the spines of the hedgehog and 
sea-urchin and protective colors. Says he: 

These contrivances are not the result of primary or 
directly causal relations, but are secondary relations, 
which appear to be removed from the province of physical 
problems, in the sense that they are supposed not to be 
the result of causal interaction. 

There appear to be various indications of some- 
what more than mere chance variations in the 
evolution of man from the lower mammalia. It 
would seem as if Nature had anticipated man, and 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 109 

had directed the steps of evolution toward him as 
the ultimate goal. 

Man is better than the brute not because he is 
stronger or swifter, for he is not — many surpass 
him — but he has intelligence, and his wit must 
overcome their muscular advantage. For one 
thing, he must stand erect, with head above his 
body, and must walk on two feet. But that is 
of no advantage till he has human intelligence. 
Yet the monkeys and the larger apes prepare the 
way under the usual path of evolutionary prog- 
ress, as if by a sort of foresight for the anticipated 
crown of all creation. The anthropoid apes are 
all arboreal. They climb the trees of the forests, 
live on nuts, cling to the branches, crawl along 
them with their four hands, rest there, but they 
have no visible need of a semiupright stature. 
They could, for all we can see, do just as well when 
they walk on the ground, to walk, as some of them 
do, on their four limbs. But they are semi- 
erect, not as a dog or a bear may occasionally rise 
on its hind feet, and not particularly for their own 
evident advantage, but, for all I can see, in a 
prophetic way, to lay down the path of evolution 
for man. That is, evolution has been guided, 
directed, along a road laid out for it, just as a 
railway train follows the track laid out for it to 
reach the city. 

Let me take another illustration or two from 
the human body showing what can easiest be 



no WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

explained as directive evolution. Most of the 
mammalia have tails and find them useful; man 
needs none and has none. Even the monkeys 
have tails, but as we come to the large anthropoid 
apes the tails pass away. The mandril has a 
short tail, the gibbon, chimpanzee, orang-outang, 
and gorilla have none. And yet they live in trees, 
and a tail would seem to be as useful for them 
for protection against falling as for the smaller 
monkeys. But man is not arboreal, and for him 
a tail would be an incumbrance. It looks as if the 
passing away of the tail in the apes nearest to 
man anticipated and prepared the way for man. 

I would take one other change of structure in 
the latest stages of evolution, which has the ap- 
pearance of anticipating man's moral nature. 
The hymen in the human female has no known 
use or purpose except that of assuring virginity. 
It is not found in the lower mammalia; but ap- 
pears in the process of evolution in the anthropoid 
apes, where it is of no advantage, except as a 
promise of its sociological value when fully devel- 
oped in the human being. Professor Schulte, of 
the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, 
informs me that he has found it fairly developed 
in the chimpanzee and the orang-outang, although 
farther from the surface than in the human species. 
It can scarcely be traced in such of the lower 
monkeys as the macaque. Its presence is a clas- 
sical example of the persistence of an organ always 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION in 

destroyed, showing the non-inheritance of in- 
juries and acquired characters. It has no known 
physiological value ; and its full development and 
use is found in the human family, while its ap- 
pearance in these anthropoid apes appears to be 
anticipative. That is, its appearance is as if it 
had been intelligently planned for, and not pro- 
duced in a haphazard, unpremeditated way. Its 
moral value is dwelt upon in the Mosaic legisla- 
tion, Deut. 22 : 13-21. 

Indeed all life is prophetic, works for an end 
in the future — so cell joins cell to form a fibril of 
a muscle. The case of the eye is only an extreme 
illustration. We call it law, but that simply gives 
a name to the problem of mystery. The blood in 
the system is all the same blood chemically, but 
the force we call life will here choose out of it to 
repair a muscle, there the skin, there the bone, 
there to create the eye, and there the special 
secretions of the body. We may be told that 
each part attracts what is needed from the blood 
for its regeneration; of course it does — that is 
what we see. The germ cell in the ovum will 
draw other cells to itself selectively, and these 
again others to themselves, to form all these dif- 
ferent parts, bone, muscle, skin; will arrange each 
in its place, will put head, body, limbs, and organs 
each in its own order, and create a chicken or a 
child. In many cases it will repeat this process 
after the organism, animal, or plant is fully de- 



ii2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

veloped. The worm cut in two will regenerate 
itself into two complete individual worms. The 
salamander will grow a new leg or eye if the 
organ is lost, and will even create it out of a root 
strange to its inheritance. So we every day see 
from the wounded trunk or root of a tree new 
adventitious buds break out where no buds were 
before, only sap and bark. Life has chosen to 
produce, where needed, a new creation, for a pur- 
pose, with what looks like an act of will. The biol- 
ogist tries to offer an explanation of this remarka- 
ble selective, directive power. He assumes that 
there has passed into the germ from the parents 
and grandparents nuclei of all the parts possessed 
by them, gemmules Darwin called them, while 
Weissmann gives them other names, determi- 
nants, biophors. Possibly such germs there are, 
although the theory is now much discredited, but 
nobody has ever seen these conjectural gemmules. 
They are, if they really exist, beyond the power 
of the microscope; and they all exist, if at all, in 
the chromatin of the nucleus of the germ-cell. 
They may be there, but there is no objective evi- 
dence for them. They are the products of the 
deductive imagination, an imagination quite legi- 
timate, but not confirmed and never confirmable. 
These brilliant and able biologists have never 
told us how it happens that these ultramicro- 
scopical germs have ever been drawn to assemble 
and compact themselves into the chromatin of the 



FORESIGHT IN EVOLUTION 113 

ovum cell, or how they were there grown or created 
for that purpose and out of the common plasm of 
the blood. If such gemmules or biophors there 
be, they are there by the million, but the directive 
force that generated and gathered them in the 
germ-cell so that they might be ready to develop 
in their time and order is not explained. Nor yet 
is it explained or explicable how or why these 
gemmules or biophors, each different and now 
crowded together, move into their own places to 
develop in the ovum the bird or the man; or, in 
the case of the butterfly, how they divide into 
two troops, one troop hastening to form the cater- 
pillar, and the other troop, waiting till the cater- 
pillar has grown big and then disorganized itself, 
that it may march forth in turn to create the 
butterfly. All we can say is that in life there is 
a selective, predictive force that looks like a 
foreseeing Intelligence. Why not call it God ? 



CHAPTER X 

NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 

IN a previous chapter I have spoken of the 
qualities of inorganic substances, such as air, 
water, carbonic acid, etc., which fit them to 
support the forms of life which were to appear 
upon the earth. There is much that may be said 
as to these vegetable and animal forms of life 
which anticipate, and prepare the way for, the 
appearance of man, who is the crown of creation, 
and especially of civilized man, man worth while, 
man more than a beast. 

That there is this adaptation between man and 
the world of life every moment proves. But we 
may call this mere good luck, if there be luck, or 
we may say that the human race has been evolved 
so as to fit his environment, rather than that an 
environment has been prepared for him. Beyond 
question man does adapt himself to his environ- 
ment, improves wild grains and sows and reaps 
them with harrows and harvesters. Man is 
adapted to his world, but it may also be that the 
world of life has been pre-adapted to his needs. 
One cannot but ask this question, whether we 
have evolved to fit the product of natural law in 

114 



NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 115 

its necessary evolution, or whether under some 
sort of guidance Nature has anticipated our needs 
and made preparation for them. Whether the 
latter alternative shall seem reasonable will de- 
pend mainly on whether the human race appears 
to be worth the foresight. This is a question of 
large and momentous import, and the very raising 
of it may seem both pretentious and absurd. 
That the earth, so great, so diverse, so multiple 
in all its grandeur of ocean and continent, with its 
prolificness of life, animal and vegetable, with the 
sun and moon that attend and serve and rule it, 
were so made to serve man, its true ruler, man who 
is so feeble, who lives so brief a day, who then 
passes to his dust just as does the gnat that teases 
him and the tiger that eats him, may seem a 
monstrous claim. 

But think again. Man is the very crown of 
all known visible existence. No physical force 
in nature is to be compared with man. Bulk does 
not measure perfection. Life, no matter how low, 
is superior to any mass of inert matter. The 
lichen on the cliff is greater than the cliff. And 
far above the life of the tree, or the life of the 
highest animal, is man, who is ruler of all, as 
reason is more than mere vitalism. As Zeus chal- 
lenged against his supremacy the total power of 
all the gods whom he could hang from a chain 
over the parapet of heaven, so, and more than so, 
for man is of another and superior class, man 



n6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

matches the genius of his wisdom and might 
against all hurricanes and billows and thunder- 
bolts, rides the waves, drives the winds, forces the 
lightning to do his slightest task, the infinite 
ether to strain with his messages, even enslaves 
the earth and the mighty sun to till his fields and 
feed him with corn and wine, rebukes savage na- 
ture and supplants its jungles and forests, cover- 
ing the earth with cities and towns and fields of 
populous plenty. The earth, all its grass and herbs 
and trees, all its insects, fishes, birds, and beasts, 
is ruled by man, submits to his will, and only 
his; and may it not be that by some higher pre- 
vision this was all designed and directed, which 
not only supplies all his ruder wants, but equally 
meets all the higher requirements of his advanced 
civilization ? Most certainly so, unless science re- 
fuses to consider the hypothesis of God. 

No one else has so definitely presented the evi- 
dence that the world of life has been prearranged 
by a higher intelligence for the uses of man as 
has Alfred Russel Wallace, in his "The World of 
Life." Have not, he asks, through the whole 
geologic history, the vegetable growths been pre- 
adapted for the coming human and animal life? 
The bulk of the seed of maize, wheat, rye, barley, 
and rice is not needed for its own propagation, 
but is needed for the support of human life par- 
ticularly, and in a less measure of lower animal 
life. A multitude of other grasses have small, in- 



NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 117 

conspicuous seeds. They can grow just as well 
without a superabundant supply of starch and 
gluten. Man needs them, for he can cook his 
food, which cattle cannot do. Yet the seeds of 
these cereal grains are so large that they attract 
animals to eat them, and they would be likely to 
become extinct but for the fact that man cul- 
tivates and develops them. In fact most of them 
have become extinct, or nearly so, in a wild state. 
As man depends on them, so they depend on 
man, as if predestined, foreordained for man. 
Man could hardly have reached civilization with- 
out them. It is true that in cultivation these 
grains have increased in size, but even in their 
wild state, like our American wild rice or the wild 
wheat lately found in Palestine, they attracted 
human attention for food. A similar phenomenon 
we observe when we consider other vegetable pro- 
ductions which have become the staple food of 
man, such as the date, and the cocoanut, the 
apple, pear, and peach, and a hundred other fruits, 
melons and roots. They are made to fit higher 
life. Their delicious sugary pulp or their mass of 
starchy consistence is of no essential use to these 
plants and trees themselves, but rather an injury. 
They are too attractive; they would be likely to 
perish off the face of the earth, as in the animal 
world have the dodo and the passenger pigeon, 
if they were not cultivated and conserved under 
the conditions of progressive civilization. 



n8 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

There is a species of plant, the Psoralea esculenta, 
growing on dry ridges in the Dakotas, which pro- 
duces a hard, compact root about the size of a 
walnut, solid with starch. The Sioux Indians 
search far abroad for it and tie it in strings for 
winter food. Of course, the plant takes some ad- 
vantage of the stored starch for its rapid growth 
in the spring. But most other plants live and 
grow equally well in other ways. It is of great 
advantage to the migrating Indians, but its quality 
is of injury to it so far as survival goes. It is for 
man's sake chiefly that it stores food. It seems 
provided for human use. The same is true of the 
grape, the huckleberry, the raspberry, the black- 
berry, the currant, the gooseberry, and other 
plants that produce delicious fruits whose main 
purpose is evidently not for themselves. They 
grow wild, uncultivated. Nature provides these 
berries for human and animal consumption, while 
therein assuring their own dispersion. There ap- 
pears to be in their provision some sort of design 
which has its end in man. 

Yet not for man only. All animal life feeds on 
vegetable life. The plant, the tree, has not its 
end in itself, but in that which it feeds. Have 
you ever watched two or three yellowbirds tear- 
ing to pieces the round ball of a dandelion head ? 
You will see that the dandelion lives not for itself 
alone, but that it may supply the wants of a 
higher and nobler kind of life. It would seem as 
if the plant were made in anticipation of the animal 



NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 119 

and equally that the animal appeared on the earth 
when its own time was ripe for it. I do not find 
it easy to believe that the giraffe, with its elon- 
gated neck, was the slow evolution of nature until 
it could reach the branches of the trees. Some 
directive force or intelligence seems to have pro- 
duced it to reach its special food. 

In various ways Nature seems to have antici- 
pated man, and, not least, man as civilized, full- 
orbed, as if Nature were working definitely for a 
higher end not yet in sight. When man began 
to feel the need of light in the night-time beyond 
that of the torch, he found oil in nuts, and animal 
fats, and soon hunted the northern seas for the 
blubber of the whale. Then when that source 
was exhausted, we burned the essence of the sap 
of the pine till that began to fail with the destruc- 
tion of the forests. Then the earth opened its 
supply of oil laid up many thousands of years 
ago for just this necessity. No doubt Nature in 
her own processes had laid up this great treasure 
of mineral oil as a by-product of superabundant 
vegetable life of a geologic age, just as she had 
laid up and had previously opened to us her store 
of coal to fit a stage in our civilization. Yet there 
appears to be an extraordinary congruousness in 
the antecedent provision of just what we should 
need. It looks very much like what we should 
call a good providence in our behalf. Equally 
the stored masses of coal in the earth were a requi- 
site for a stage in human civilization. Our cities 



i2o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

could not have been built or our factories run on 
wood for fuel ; the forests could not have sufficed. 
The carboniferous period was the prophecy of the 
human industry of modern life, ready to be ful- 
filled when the time was ripe. There was pre- 
adaptation, which was marvellously lucky, if it 
were not purposive. 

The metals generally afford another example. 
Iron is needed for civilization. Originally it was 
disseminated in the igneous rocks. When these 
were broken up then came the red earths, followed 
by new concentrations from age to age brought 
about by vegetation; it was not till later periods 
that the greatest concentration took place. Iron 
was not needed till man appeared. Much the 
same is true of gold. The leaner ones were pul- 
verized by natural processes, and then concen- 
trated by gravity in water until the rich placers 
were formed just before man arrived to need and 
seek it there. 

At a primitive stage, when hardly superior to 
the higher apes, we can conceive of man as taking 
for his uses a club from a fallen tree, or a conveni- 
ent stone. On the famous Phoenician bowl of 
Praeneste such a cave-man is represented with a 
stone in his hand pursuing a hunter in his chariot. 
He looks no better than an ape, and Clermont- 
Ganneau called him an ape. Stones are neces- 
sarily abundant, and handy, and here is no evi- 
dence of preadaptation of the stone for the uses 
of man reaching for civilization by means of a 



NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 121 

tool. But the next stage is to supply himself with 
a better weapon, a bow. That requires a peculiar, 
elastic sort of wood, not like the pine, or cedar, 
or oak, but an ash or yew, or some other sort of 
elastic wood. It is ready for him as soon as he 
wants it. It was not necessary in the order of 
nature that the special quality of elasticity should 
be supplied by the ash, but it was necessary for 
man's upward progress that the ash should ante- 
cedently be provided for his use when he should 
need it. Doctor Wallace adduces this as a pre- 
adaptation. I would not definitely assert it, but 
it is a plausible if not quite palpable conclusion 
that some directive purpose provided the elastic 
wood for the primitive bow. To be sure, we may 
insist that nature, through her superabundant 
vitality, quite unconsciously reaches out in every 
direction for every possible quality, and so blindly 
hits on elasticity in the ash, as it does on pith in 
the alder or pliability in the osier; and yet the 
multitude of similar happy adaptations in plant 
and animal life for the uses of civilization forces 
us to consider whether some purposive and direc- 
tive force has not anticipated the human need and 
provided for it. I do not mean to argue that flint 
was made just for man's use as a tool, or that the 
reed was made hollow that man might use it as 
a blow-gun, for the reed's own need of strength 
is explanation enough of its evolution. I only in- 
stance the case of the ash or yew as illustrating 
how the preadaptation of a quality not necessary 



i22 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

for the tree was imperative for the use of man in 
his early stage of progressive culture, as if pre- 
arranged for his needs. 

Doctor Wallace instances a similar adaptation 
to man's uses in the matter of navigation, intro- 
ducing it with this general statement: 

Taking first the innumerable different kinds of wood, 
whose qualities of strength, lightness, ease of cutting and 
planing, smoothness of surface, beauty, and durability 
are so exactly suited to the needs of civilized man that it 
is almost doubtful if he could have reached civilization 
without them. The considerable range in their hardness, 
in their durability when exposed to the action of water 
or of the soil, in their weight and their elasticity, renders 
them serviceable to him in a thousand ways which are 
totally removed from any use made of them by the lower 
animals. — A. R. Wallace, "The World of Life," p. 350. 

Doctor Wallace shows that but for the existence 
of wood having just the qualities necessary for 
the building of boats and ships the whole course 
of history would have been different, and perhaps 
civilization could not have been developed. The 
Mediterranean would have been as impassable as 
the Atlantic, and, later, America could not have 
been discovered, and Australia and probably 
South Africa would have been unknown. All this 
knowledge and civilization depend on certain quali- 
ties in vegetable growth not needed by the lower 
animals, and no more by the trees themselves, 
which could equally have performed without them 
all their chemical functions in the absorption of 






NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 123 

carbon and the transpiration of oxygen, as they 
did in the geologic period of the acrogens when 
the carboniferous measures were laid, and could 
have satisfied all the needs of the unintelligent 
animal world. These qualities are useful to man, 
to man only, and they came into plant history, 
as it would seem, in anticipation of the time when 
man should make them useful; acquired late in 
the process of the ages, just when needed, quite 
as they would appear if some directive purpose 
and impulse had prearranged their occurrence. 

Again, Wallace calls attention to the countless 
list of the minor by-products of vegetable life 
which are of such immense advantage to man in 
his advance in civilization and comfort, enjoy- 
ment, and health. Such are the multitude of 
drugs and medicines, of which opium and quinine 
are examples. The milky juice of the poppy may 
be of use to it in resisting drouth, but why should 
it also deposit morphine useful only to men? 
The cinchona bark might be as serviceable to the 
tree without the quinine in it, but it is needed for 
man. What is true of these and many other 
vegetable drugs is true also of thousands of other 
by-products of vegetable life, balsams, gums, 
resins, dyes, spices, perfumes, which if in any 
measure and degree of advantage to the plant, 
are only subsidiarily so, and not necessary; but 
which are of great advantage to man, and particu- 
larly to civilized man, and will be for a million 



i2 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

years to come. Can we believe that the fragrance 
of the rose or the violet was essential to the plant 
itself ? Its color was enough to attract insects 
without its odor which seems added for our delec- 
tation. A multitude of plants have for their own 
advantage developed a thick sap, which is enough 
for their protection; but a few have added to it 
something which allows it to harden into the 
extraordinary qualities of india-rubber, of advan- 
tage not to the tree but to man. Without that 
peculiar combination of qualities man could 
neither have created the submarine telegraph- 
cable nor ridden the automobile. He finds the 
rubber as it were foreordained for his own use 
rather than for the use of the rubber-tree. 

Take as an example the trees and plants that 
supply us with sugar, a very important element in 
our comfort. We find it in certain species of maple. 
Other maples do not have it, do not need it. But 
it has been of importance to man, as if put there 
for his advantage. All the more is this true of 
the sugar-cane and the sugar-beet. Other reeds 
and other plants of the beet family have a juice 
that is not sweet. Here is a special provision 
useful, almost necessary, for man, supplied to 
him when he comes to need it. Because it is not 
essential to the plant or tree but is essential to 
man it appears as if it were the result of some 
directive evolution in his behalf. I do not say 
that this evidence is conclusive, but it is of the 



NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 125 

same sort and value as much other probable evi- 
dence on which we must depend in life. 

In the matter of clothing the realms of life seem 
to have united in anticipating the wants of man 
as he advances into civilization. The rude man 
emerging from the brute needed in warm countries 
no clothing, and in a colder climate was satisfied 
with the lion's skin of Hercules, or the pelts of 
his sheep and goats. But growing nicety de- 
manded other garments, and the sheep supplied 
wool, the bolls of a plant offered the fibres of 
cotton, and the silkworm spun for man its cocoon. 
The silkworm might have been protected equally, 
like other grubs, with a hard case; the seeds of 
the cotton did not need so soft a bed, for a mul- 
titude of congeneric plants are without it; and 
the sheep might have resisted the cold with such 
a covering as other animals of its sort find ade- 
quate. But these specialties of growth not neces- 
sary for them are needed for man; and they are 
provided as man needs them, not the sheep, the 
worm, or the plant. Is it too much to see in 
these and in a multitude of similar cases some 
directive prevision and plan ? 

Yet it will easily be replied that Nature is not 
all our kind mother. The argument can be turned 
the other way, for Nature produces not only valu- 
able drugs, spices, gums, essences, oils, etc., but 
also poisons that endanger his life, while a multi- 
tude of weeds, innocuous in a state of savagery, 



i26 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

appear to pester his agriculture as he rises in the 
scale of civilization. This is true, and in its mea- 
sure it favors the conclusion that Nature works 
indiscriminately, and in every direction, to pro- 
duce anything and everything, good or bad that 
may arise; but they are comparatively few, and 
have their protective uses as do spines and thorns ; 
and if beasts that graze are able to discover and 
avoid them, the same is true of intelligent man, 
not to speak of their value as drugs. Equally it 
is not the careful farmer that allows himself to 
be much troubled by weeds. 

Yet Doctor Wallace's argument, it appears to 
me, must not be pressed too far. The starch of 
the potato is valuable for man, but the deadly 
nightshade belongs to the same family, and is so 
specialized as to be dangerous to man. In the 
same family and the same field we find foods and 
poisons, fragrances and stenches, the flower and 
the thorn. If we can, as Doctor Wallace has done, 
gather the delights of sight, taste, and smell found 
in the vegetable world into one "bundle of myrrh/' 
to strengthen our faith in the Creator who fore- 
saw the needs of his creature man, it would also 
be easy to gather under the shadow of the upas- 
tree the disagreeable, the pernicious, and the fatal. 
The spicy and the sweet are matched in some 
measure with the acrid and the fetid. 

This is all true. Nature does not coddle us 
with a satiety of sweets. The rose is beset with 



NATURE'S PREPARATION FOR MAN 127 

thorns. We would not have it otherwise. Yet 
common experience testifies that the useful vastly 
outweighs and outnumbers the harmful. Every 
green field and every wooded hill testifies to this. 
The immense preponderance of good does not 
seem quite fortuitous. If such preponderance 
there is, may we not presume that there was pur- 
pose in it ? If man is the very crown of all Na- 
ture's aspirations, and if provision was made for 
him in physical nature, in the composition of the 
oceans, of sea, and sky, may we not also presume 
that the abundant supply of the organic products 
of Nature, and their qualities absolutely essential 
for man's life and progress, give a presumption 
that they too anticipated man? The bulk of 
them and the nicety of their adaptations support 
such a view. They fit into our wants with the 
exactitude of the junctions of a dissected map. 
While there is no question of the miscellaneous- 
ness of the productions of nature, yet they are 
not indiscriminate. The useful animals and plants 
that come into existence with man vastly exceed 
those that are pernicious; there is a place in the 
scheme of things for the tiger's tooth and the 
spines of the cactus. While too much must not 
be made of Doctor Wallace's argument in "The 
World of Life," yet its cumulative bearing ap- 
pears to me to have weight as indicating that 
there was a control in nature which guided the 
operation of its laws for the benefit of man. 



CHAPTER XI 
REASON AND SOUL 

W! know the world of existences and forces 
under three forms, that of matter, that 
of life, and that of thought. In preced- 
ing chapters I have indicated how the world of 
matter and the world of life appear to me to 
bear witness to a superior Intelligence which has 
created or guided them. I now come to consider 
whether the world of thought has a similar origin, 
or has merely grown, in an evolutionary way, 
out of the worlds of matter and life. 

The forces of matter, life, and thought are 
totally diverse from each other. Life is a phenom- 
enon of tremendous significance. It marks an 
absolutely different stage in the operation of na- 
ture. Physical forces can give us rocks, moun- 
tains, continents, rivers, oceans, winds, lightning, 
and rain, and their continued operation would re- 
duce the earth to a degradation of morass and sea. 
But life brings a new force which fights physical 
forces, produces forms, vegetable and animal, 
which operate and direct to their own ends all 
physical forces, and exercise a dominance over 
them. But there is a third stage in the opera- 

128 



REASON AND SOUL 129 

tions of nature. As organic life is of a different 
order from inert matter, so mind is of yet another 
order from either, and vastly higher than they. 
With the animal kingdom there came in mind, 
not possessed by the physical elements, and no 
more by the vegetable kingdom. It is, in some 
degree, a characteristic of all animal life. The 
lowest forms have intelligence enough to feel for 
their food. As higher forms appear they learn to 
avoid danger, to search abroad for their sustenance, 
to swim, to fly, to run, till conscious reason appears 
in man and is supreme over the course of nature. 
As I have found it hard to believe that the 
activities of life can be fully explained by the laws 
of physics, although life constantly uses the laws 
of physics, so I am not easily persuaded that men- 
tality, with its crowning power of will, is explained 
under the laws of life. Such is the teaching of 
those who hold that thinking is nothing more than 
brain action. Beyond all question the brain is 
active in all mental processes ; and one can make 
the hypothesis that the brain is all there is to it, 
that its province is to produce, secrete thought, 
feeling, will, consciousness, just as the liver se- 
cretes bile; or one can take the other hypothesis 
that the brain is an instrument which is used in 
the production of mental activities by some sepa- 
rate, outside, immaterial power somewhat as a 
harp, inactive and silent itself, is the instrument 
of music, responsive to the fingering of the musi- 



i 3 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

cian. In the latter view one could think of the 
brain either as responsive to the influence of some 
universal force, as the wind plays on an aeolian 
harp, or as affected by the action of an individual 
mind attached to itself alone. That would be the 
man's soul, and this view has held the field the 
world over, and in all ages. This is mainly be- 
cause the phenomenon of will is evidently the 
action of individual and not general consciousness. 
We know, if we know anything, that we feel, we 
think, and we will, each for himself. We may, 
then, dismiss the supposition of some universal 
force blowing upon the brain or, to use the figure 
of the ocean, bubbling up into it as producing all 
its activities, whether we call that force God or 
anything else. Under the hypothesis of some 
external power using the brain as instrument our 
consciousness puts it under the control of each 
individual's own mind, but may leave the ques- 
tion open whether other minds can also use it. 
We have then two alternatives left to consider: 
one that thought is entirely a function of the 
brain; the other that each brain has its own rul- 
ing mind, separate from matter, which uses the 
brain as its implement. 

The physiologist cannot decide which of these 
two hypotheses is true. His business is to study 
the activities of the brain, and he may see nothing 
but the brain acting, while the psychologist may 
see something else. 



REASON AND SOUL 131 

The knife and the microscope can investigate 
only the material brain and discern how it works. 
If there is mind, it is as invisible as the wind which 
we know blows on a harp. It might seem a hope- 
ful method of further research to inquire whether 
the law of conservation of energy applies to 
mental action. Here we find that every thought 
or feeling or volition is accompanied by a certain 
action of the brain cells, and flow of blood, so that 
the brain is affected by every mental activity. 
Yet this is not conclusive ; there may be something 
else. Even so the harp is affected in the move- 
ment of its strings and the vibration of its frame 
by the finger of the player, so that the amount of 
force in the finger is exactly matched by the energy 
of these vibrations. But it is the player that 
plays the tune, not the harp. In the case of the 
brain, however, it is impossible to prove that any 
Joule's law is applicable to the transformation of 
brain matter or brain force into an equivalent 
amount of thought force. In his Presidential 
Address before the British Association in its 
physiology section, 191 1, Professor J. S. Mac- 
donald says: 

There is no one at the present time who is in a position 
to discuss the energy transformation of the central ner- 
vous system. Further, there is certainly no one capable 
of dealing with such peculiarities as might arise in the 
energy transformation of that part of the brain which is 
associated with the mind. 



i 3 2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 
He further says : 

There is no scientific evidence to support or to rebut 
the statement that the brain is possibly affected by influ- 
ences other than those that reach it by the definite paths 
proceeding from the sense-organs and from the different 
receptive surfaces of the body. It is still possible that the 
brain is an instrument traversed freely, as the ear by sound, 
by an unknown influence which finds resonance within it. 
Possibly, indeed, that the mind is a complex of such reso- 
nances, music for which the brain is no more than the 
instrument, individual because the music of a single harp, 
rational because of the orderly structure of the harp. 
Consider such a possibility . . . inasmuch as an instru- 
ment shaped in the embryo of a certain set of conditions 
may in due course of time become the play of some new 
influence which has taken no immediate part in fashion- 
ing it. I will not dwell upon the point beyond this state- 
ment that I find it difficult to refrain from using the word 
soul. 

Professor Macdonald's illustration appears to 
me to have argument in it. The ear is a delicate 
organ, inactive and useless until mysteriously ex- 
cited by a vibration from without. Just so the 
eye more delicately constructed must wait for the 
access of light before it can see; and even so it 
may be that the yet more delicate organism of 
the brain, which is torpid in sleep or under anaes- 
thesia, is an instrument which is traversed as freely 
as is the ear or the eye, by an exterior influence 
which finds resonance within it. That influence 
would be the soul. 



REASON AND SOUL 133 

We see; but we do not see what it is that 
makes us see. We have sight and the organ of 
sight; but because we cannot see the cause of 
sight which affects the eye we assume and be- 
lieve in an invisible ether and its invisible waves. 
We cannot see the cause which affects the brain 
and gives us thought, but we are quite within our 
rights when we assume that something works on 
and through the brain, and we call it, invisible as 
it is, mind or soul. We have the right to believe 
that it is something more and other than brain, 
because the brain is purely material, matter that 
has life in it, and its products must be material, 
as all products of living matter are — seeds, fruits, 
muscles, organs. Thinking is not material. It 
is very hard to conceive of thought as a function 
of matter, even of the brain, for we see in it noth- 
ing akin to material forces. Thought belongs to 
a different plane. It is immaterial, spiritual, not 
physical. What is a thought ? Can you put it 
in balances and weigh it ? Can you measure its 
bulk? Has it dimensions? By what yardstick 
can we measure love and hate ? By what mi- 
crometer can we compare the relative values of 
ideas? Conscience has no relation to weight or 
bulk. No physiologist can tell us that Shake- 
speare exhausted more brain tissue in writing 
"The Tempest' ' than Walt Whitman in compos- 
ing "Leaves of Grass," or that Virgil's brain was 
more worn away than that of Maevius. 



i 3 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Yet it is for another reason chiefly that the 
boor or the philosopher believes he has a soul, a 
proof that depends on consciousness. He feels 
that there is something in him that is lord of his 
body. He originates purpose, will, and his body 
serves and obeys him. He cannot think of the 
body as himself. He is its master; it is his slave. 
The master must be something other than the 
slave. He does not see it, and he thinks of it as 
something spiritual. It is then easy for the sav- 
age to imagine that in dreams his soul leaves the 
body and wanders off to visit other souls. The 
philosopher regards the dreams as mere fancies of 
imagination, but he knows that something in him, 
or, rather, the real self has initiative, originates 
thought, exercises will, and using the reservoir of 
the brain sends messages by way of the nerves, 
which are but the extensions of the brain to all 
the body. To him the whole nervous system, 
brain as well as the spinal cord and the nerves, 
seems all to be but his instruments, the brain like 
the boiler of a locomotive from which power goes 
through steam-pipes and cylinders to move the 
pistons and wheels, while the engineers will con- 
trols it. So I look at the operation of the mind 
and the body. The brain is the steam-chest, the 
blood is the furnace which supplies its force, the 
steam-pipes are the nerves which carry the force 
where needed, and the remaining machinery cor- 
responds to the parts of the body which obey the 



REASON AND SOUL 135 

message of the nerves. But back of all is that 
which gives orders, which we call the soul, the en- 
gineer of the great human machine, which knows, 
thinks, wills, while brain and cord and nerves are 
its obedient servants. Man wills; he cannot 
think that matter wills. There is something of 
the same intangible order as is the will itself that 
he feels is ruler, originator, initiator, something 
more than the material body. If there is nothing 
beyond the working of the cerebro-spinal nervous 
system, then, as it appears to me, there can be no 
free-will; all must go on mechanistically. But it 
does not go on mechanistically. "No physics, 
no mathematics," says Sir Oliver Lodge, "can 
calculate the orbit of a house-fly.' ' 

Such seems to me to be the reason why all ex- 
cept some philosophers have come to believe in 
the existence of a soul within, or related to, the 
body. It carries conviction to my mind, and I 
do not think it is because I and all other people 
wish to believe. 

What relation does belief in the immateriality 
of the human soul have with belief in God ? Just 
this, that the existence of many millions of human 
souls, all immaterial, all invisible, does away with 
any presumption against the existence of a superior, 
or supreme, immaterial, invisible being related to 
the universe which he may control, even as the 
human soul controls its body. The argument is 
not absolute and final; one can yet disbelieve. 



i 3 6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

The step is easy, however, from the human soul 
to the existence of a soul r of the universe, which 
yet is not the universe, but which rules over it as 
the human soul rules the body. 









CHAPTER XII 

THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT 

THE reason of man, and to a less degree that 
of animals, is something to wonder at and 
admire; but the instinct of animals, and 
particularly of insects, is even stranger, more mys- 
terious. Reason accomplishes ends and knows 
why it uses the means; instinct does as much but 
does not understand why it does them. Reason 
rises so high in the realm of freedom that instinct 
is not needed; for it makes its own rules, finds 
new ways to meet every new condition, uses tools 
instead of feet and horns, thinks, plans, contrives, 
combines, controls the forces of nature, and cre- 
ates civilization. In this highest realm of nature 
we seem to see God walking in the garden, but 
may we not see him quite as really in instinct ? 

Instinct does the works of reason without its 
reasons, without knowing why, without being 
taught. The worker bee just hatched from the 
pupa state flies unaccompanied to a distant flower, 
gathers its honey, returns to the hive, and deposits 
it in a cell, and all without knowing that the 
honey placed there is to be food for the next 
generation. We know why we store our provi- 
sions; the bee knows nothing, simply does it. 

137 



i 3 8 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Both instinct and reason are found in man, 
but instinct is soon nearly suppressed, while in 
the lower animals, and particularly in insects, it 
is reason that is little developed and instinct con- 
trols. The new-born child takes the mother's 
breast by instinct, and for a period all, or nearly 
all, its activities, seem to be instinctive ; but in a 
few days it moves its eyes for a dim purpose, and 
in a few months walks about, a creature of rea- 
son and will. A grown man is conscious of scarce 
any act that is instinctive. But the action of the 
bee as it builds its honeycomb, or of the solitary 
wasp when it provides for its young, may be re- 
garded as wholly controlled by instinct. It is to 
be considered whether these actions of instinct 
can be regarded as purely the product of uncon- 
scious evolution, or whether they have been guided 
by a foreseeing, superintending intelligence. 

In the higher vertebrates it would seem as if 
some forms of instinct could have been the prod- 
uct of normal evolution. The instinct which sends 
wild geese from their nesting summer home 
to escape in more southern lands a hungry winter 
may seem to have its origin in some more indefinite 
and gradual pushing toward more abundant food 
as the northern supply was exhausted with the 
freezing of the waters. Those which happened 
to do this once may have followed the sun back 
in the next spring, although we do not see exactly 
why, and their young may have inherited, so it 



THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT 139 

is said, although such power of inheritance is not 
evident, the memory of the spring and autumn 
journey. It is not clear that such northern nest- 
ing birds could have survived the winters, small 
insect-eating birds, before they learned to start, 
while food was yet sufficient, for their journey of 
thousands of miles forth and back every year; 
but perhaps geology may help us. The changes 
may not have been so extreme then between sum- 
mer and winter, and the annual trip may not have 
been so long. Let it be allowed that the instinct 
of birds of passage may have developed out of 
the slow accidents of undesigned advantage, re- 
membered and repeated and then transmitted to 
posterity; yet such migration hardly touches the 
fringe of the problem of instinct. It has to do 
with a class of animal life that possesses the mask 
of reason. 

But take another case, instanced by Professor 
J. A. Thompson, that of the eel, which has a brain 
of a very low order. Those of northern Europe 
probably begin their life on the verge of the deep 
sea west of Ireland and southward toward the 
Canaries. The eel rises to the surface, for months 
a small transparent larva. After a year it is one 
of a million "elvers" passing up a river. Some 
have travelled three thousand miles. Here they 
grow, but do not breed. They return to the deep 
sea to breed. Can this be explained on the ma- 
chine theory of life ? Can it be explained by any 



i 4 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

happy accident of environment and evolution? 
The movements seem too immense and complex 
to be thus accounted for, without some intelli- 
gent guidance in the process of evolution. When 
I consider this case, which can be matched with 
the migrations of salmon and many other fishes, 
I begin to feel more doubt whether evolution will 
explain the migrations of birds. 

Let us return to the case of that honey-bee whose 
first flight has led it safely to a difficult flower. 
Capture it now, and carry it about, and when let 
fall it turns around and flies to its hive. It knows 
where it belongs; it has a strange sense of direc- 
tion beyond reason. That is the way bee-hunters 
find the hole into which bees enter in a hollow 
tree in the forest. I cannot see how that sense 
of direction could have come by evolution, seeing 
that each colony has a new hive or hollow tree, 
and has to be born with a separate sense of direc- 
tion. You can't explain the flight back as you 
can the return flight of a boomerang. 

Is it easy to conceive how among bees the mar- 
vellous development of instinct should appear in 
neither the male nor the female, the drones and 
the queen bee, neither of which do any work, nor 
inherit any skill; while the workers, who show 
such marvellous instinct in finding the flower and 
expressing its sweet and finding their way back to 
the hive, and then building the waxen cells and 
filling them with honey, and then killing the use- 



THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT 141 

less drones, are neuters, sexless, and have inherited 
none of their skill? Can all this have come by 
the slow process of inheritance, where there is no 
sexual inheritance? Not a worker will transmit 
its skill to its progeny, for it has no progeny, and 
its parentage had no such skill to transmit. One 
cannot help thinking that this purposive, but not 
inherited, power has been imposed upon the bee 
from some outside intelligence, which has even 
taught it how to select a grub in one of the cells 
and nourish it to be the future queen. And what 
has been said of bees can be said of ants, whose 
colonies are divided into masters and slaves. Is 
it any wonder that Virgil says in the fourth of his 
Georgics that bees "have received a share of the 
divine intelligence and drafts from the heavens; 
for God pervades all, earth and the expanse of 
air, and the deep vault of heaven' ' ? 

Of the various phases of instinct the parental 
instinct is one of the most necessary, essential to 
the continuance of the species, yet apparently in- 
explicable on the theory of evolution, for it pro- 
vides for the future of the young of which only 
mammalia and birds can have any knowledge. 
And in the case of birds we cannot suppose that 
they have any knowledge why they sit for weeks 
most uncomfortably on their eggs. They do not 
know that young birds are to be hatched from the 
eggs, nor do they know the eggs must be kept 
warm. They simply do it from instinct. It is 



142 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the law and they must. But we can see no way 
that instinct of law can have been acquired under 
the mere provisions of nature through develop- 
ment. The human race has this parental, or at 
least maternal, instinct, and adds to it reason. 
The mammalia have it, and will fight for their 
young, at least till they are weaned. But it is 
among the insects, which know nothing of their 
young, that the most remarkable illustrations 
occur of the parental instinct. 

This parental instinct, often so wonderfully de- 
veloped, is not easily explained by evolution. In 
the case of man, who has reason, a plausible ex- 
planation can be conceived. The mother con- 
sciously carries the child in her body, anticipates 
its birth, thinks much about it, suffers for it the 
pains of childbirth, and feels the necessity of suck- 
ling it. Both she and the father know the value 
of the child as he grows to be the defender and 
the provider of the home and the tribe. Mother- 
love and father-love are by no means all instinct. 
But it is not so with the lower animals. They do 
not feel the eggs or the young growing in the ma- 
ternal body. They have no sense of prospective 
value of the young when they shall become adult. 
What is done for the young is a burden to the 
parent. The selfish instinct would lead the mother 
to desert her offspring, as the ostrich is said to 
leave its eggs to hatch in the warm sand. But 
parental instincts overcome the interest of the 






THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT 143 

parent. This appears not only in the higher 
mammalia and birds, but also in fishes and in- 
sects which will never have any knowledge of 
their young. 

Consider the case of the cabbage-butterfly, as 
one of many. It takes pains to lay its eggs on 
the cabbage on which its young must feed, but 
on which it does not itself feed. We call this 
instinct, but by what power or what evolution 
does it come to select for the nidus of its egg the 
one plant on which its young must feed? It is 
difficult to refer this instinct to the slow process 
of eliminating in generation after generation for 
many tens of thousands of years all the butterflies 
whose grubs did not happen to find a suitable food 
in the cabbage. But even so, how came the butter- 
fly to choose the cabbage to lay its eggs on, par- 
ticularly when it never has seen and never will 
see its progeny, and does not itself feed on the 
cabbage ? To be sure, as a caterpillar it fed on 
the cabbage, and it might be said that somehow 
as a butterfly it remembered its previous incarna- 
tion and returned to its first love, but it is not 
easy to conceive that it had any physical basis 
for such memory, when we consider that when it 
passed from the pupa into the chrysalis state all 
its interior parts were disorganized and reduced 
to pulp, nervous system as well as digestive, and 
only the germinal disks left which were to reor- 
ganize the butterfly out of the worm. 



i 4 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Consider the parental instinct of the solitary 
wasps in providing for their young, of which they 
will know nothing. With the egg they put a 
caterpillar of some sort which will be food for the 
worm when hatched from the egg. They choose 
different victims, of which one has a single ner- 
vous ganglion, another three or even more. They 
sting it in one or three or more places, just where 
the ganglia are, as if with as much knowledge as 
a surgeon, so as to paralyze and not kill ; and they 
even crush, when necessary, the head of the 
victim so that it can live inactive until the wasp's 
eggs can hatch and it can supply food for the grub. 
Here is parental instinct, and much more, too. 
We have an extraordinary surgical skill which 
Bergson tries to explain as "a sympathy' ' (in the 
etymological sense) between the wasp and its 
victim which teaches it from within, so to say, 
concerning the vulnerability of the caterpillar. 
This feeling of vulnerability, he says, " might owe 
nothing to outward perception, but result from 
the mere presence together of the wasp and the 
caterpillar, considered no longer as two organisms, 
but as two activities." To my mind this is a 
meaningless explanation. It explains nothing. 
They are two organisms, and must be so considered 
and they are two activities. It is a mad attempt 
by a mist of words to escape from the easier ex- 
planation of a superior intelligence which has 
taught instinct what to do. I do not know why 






THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT 145 

teleology may not be as legitimate as any other 
device of philosophy. But I agree with Bergson 
that this parental instinct and this clairvoyance 
are not to be explained by evolution. 

It would seem impossible to explain how the 
parental instinct, and particularly the paternal, 
could have come by any sort of evolution in the 
case of certain of the lowest vertebrata, toads and 
fishes. Says the German naturalist, Doctor Wil- 
liam Berndt: 

Among the toads there are fathers which apparently 
swallow their young, that is, the spawn; but the paternal 
gullet is the babies' cradle in which they merrily develop 
(Rhinoderma darwini); in the case of others (Pipa amer- 
icana) the young pass their tenderest youth in honey- 
comblike cavities on the mother's back, in which the 
spawn is supposed to be placed by the father. In others 
still (Alytes obstetricans, the well-known obstetrical toad 
or nurse-frog), the father acts as midwife. He twines 
the chain of eggs about his hind legs and buries himself 
alive for nearly two weeks, until they are ready to hatch. 

Another one of many remarkable cases of pa- 
ternal care is that of the Siamese "fighting-fish." 
They build for the eggs a nest of foam bubbles, 
and the eggs are deposited in it to hatch. When 
the young fry appear it is the father first that de- 
votes himself to their protection against even the 
mother, and attacks with fury any intruder. All 
this is what we call instinct, far above reason, a 
sacrifice and care which no science can explain. 



146 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

If it is "creative evolution" it has needed intelli- 
gence to guide the evolution. 

Passing now from the parental instinct to that 
intuitional clairvoyance which has been noted in 
the case of the solitary wasps, we may take the 
case of the Philanthus apivorus, which has the 
same power. It feeds on bees and its story is 
told by Fabre. It meets the unsuspecting bee, 
perhaps on a flower. With its weapon it stabs 
the bee, not anywhere it may happen, but at one 
spot, just under what may be called the chin, 
just where the head ganglia are, and the blow 
instantly paralyzes the bee, so that it can make 
no resistance with its more powerful sting. Then 
the brigand holds the bee for a minute or two, as 
if to make sure that the blow was effective, and 
then crushes the bee and forces out of it the 
honey it had swallowed, and makes its meal from 
it. This is not reason, it is instinct; but could 
that instinct have been reached by a slow process 
of reason and experience, after millions of trials 
by millions of bee-hunters which had struck their 
victims wherever it might happen, and had finally 
learned to choose the right spot for the deadly 
blow ? It does not seem reasonable. That knowl- 
edge goes beyond the directive agency of chance. 

One or two further illustrations of almost in- 
credible instinct I take from Professor J. Arthur 
Thompson. The liver-fluke consists of only a 
few cells altogether. It has no nervous system. 



THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT 147 

c< It is covered with cilia, and has energy enough to 
swim about for a day or two in the water pools 
of the pasturage. It comes in contact with many 
things, but it responds to none until haply it 
touches the little fresh-water snail, the only con- 
tact that will enable it to continue its life/' Here 
it enters the breathing aperture and goes through 
various modifications and multiplications until it 
is taken up by a sheep and completes its metamor- 
phoses. The response to the one stimulus of this 
very simple organism cannot be explained mechan- 
ically nor easily by evolution. It appears to have 
been bestowed on the liver-fluke. 

Another case is that of the fresh-water mussel. 
She carries her young in her outer gill plate, and 
does not set them free unless there is a stickleback 
or the like in the immediate vicinity. "Then she 
liberates a crowd of pinhead-like larval mussels 
who rush out into the water like boys from the 
open school door." "They are aware of the 
stickleback; they fasten on it to begin another 
chapter of their life." This is instinct somehow 
imposed on the mother mussel and her infant 
brood. How came they to possess it ? The best 
explanation I can find is that a supreme intelli- 
gence gave this instinct where reason could find 
no place to abide. 

Yet one final illustration must be added, which 
I take from Bergson, following Fabre. There is a 
little beetle called the Sitaris. It chooses to lay 



148 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

its eggs on the underground passages of a certain 
sort of bee. But why does it seek that of all 
places ? It is a long and intricate story, far be- 
yond the powers of the accidental strivings of 
evolution. The young larva hatched from the 
beetle's egg springs upon the male bee as it 
emerges from the passage, clings to him, is car- 
ried on his nuptial flight, when it passes to the 
female bee, and remains attached to her until she 
lays her eggs in the honey. It then leaps on an 
egg floating on the honey, devours it and devel- 
ops, rests on the shell, and undergoes its first 
metamorphosis. Now it eats the honey which 
had been prepared for the grub of the bee, and 
develops into the perfect beetle. I fail to make 
it seem possible that such a complex of apparent 
purpose, which seems to surpass reason, which 
amazes the biologist, could have come to be be- 
cause one Sitaris out of a million happened in an 
accident of nature to have laid its egg in the 
tunnel of a certain bee, and the worm when 
hatched happened to jump on the male bee as it 
came out, and then happened to jump on the 
female bee, and then happened to light on the 
bee's egg floating on the honey, and that this 
happened often enough in its posterity until a 
sort of memory of this success was inherited in all 
the worms of the species. Am I told that this 
was not all achieved in one generation, or all at 
once ? Then I ask, What was the use of inherit- 






THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT 149 

ing any of it until the whole was combined in 
one achievement; and what likelihood that the 
second generation would inherit any of it ? Here 
is a purpose which to my mind is more easily ex- 
plained theistically. Bergson refuses to explain 
it on Darwinian principles, and is driven to the 
extraordinary assumption that in a sort of mysti- 
cism the invading insect has a sympathetic under- 
standing of the insect it has invaded. That means 
that one insect has an intuition of the habits and 
intentions of another species ; that an insect which 
has but a feeble consciousness of itself has an as- 
tounding consciousness of the mental workings and, 
as we see in the case of the wasps, even of the 
finest anatomy of other sorts of insects. The ex- 
planation is more amazing than the facts observed. 
To me it is more difficult to refer such mysterious 
intelligence to the insects than to God. 

I do not in this discussion deny evolution, for 
to my mind it is proved beyond question. But 
in evolution I see what biologists can see, and all 
they can see, the orderly progress of higher and 
higher forms of life, and of new accessions of in- 
stinct and reason. But when it comes to the ex- 
planation of the causes of such progression we 
must consult philosophy, and the philosophy which 
thinks it discovers intelligent guidance of evolu- 
tion cannot be peremptorily excluded. Darwin's 
philosophy rested on "gemmules," though without 
denying guidance, and others have put "bio- 



i S o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

phors" and determinants, as many as may be 
needed, in the compass of the blastomere of the 
ovum and sperm. But this does not make it 
clear how ancestral knowledge, memory, instinct 
are transmitted to the successive generations of 
birds and fishes and insects. It is one thing, and 
a comparatively easy thing, difficult though it is, 
to conceive of the physical elements of a bird's 
or animal's body concentrated as gemmules in 
the spermatic or ovarian cell to develop into the 
body, for they are physical. But the memory, 
the pregenital habit, the parental foresight, the 
wasp's surgical skill, the neuter bee's architecture 
— can we suppose that these can be broken up 
and transmitted by "determinants" and "bio- 
phors?" Or is it conceivable that Darwinian 
"gemmules" in the chromatin of the egg can 
carry a habit, an ancestral memory, which has 
been conceived of not as inhering in and dependent 
on cells, but as immaterial activities ? To me it 
appears quite legitimate and very reasonable to 
seek outside of the aimless and casual movements 
of physical and vital forces for the intelligent 
guidance of some superior power. When we con- 
sider the realm of mentality, of instinct, and reason, 
we may recur to the untaught wisdom of the Man 
of Uz and say with him . 

"Ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee; 
And the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee; 
Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; 



THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT i S i 

And the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee: 
Who knoweth not in all these 
That the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? 
In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, 
And the breath of all mankind." 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE DIRECT VISION OF GOD 

THE evidences for God drawn from nature, 
from matter, life, and mind, the things 
visible to us and experienced by us, are 
those that appealed to the author of the biblical 
poem which summoned all the forces of nature, 
the lightning and the cloud, Orion and the Plei- 
ades, the horse that snuffeth the battle afar off, 
Behemoth and Leviathan, to testify of God, and 
who asked: "Who knoweth not in all these that 
the hand of the Lord has wrought this ? " It was 
to this argument that Paul looked when he said: 
"The invisible things of him since the creation of 
the world are clearly seen, being perceived through 
the things that are made, even his everlasting 
power and divinity." These are the arguments 
which have convinced the world, and on which I 
would chiefly depend. They are based on the 
presumption that if, as has usually been believed, 
God made the universe, marks of his handiwork 
will be visible. They do not command utter con- 
viction as does a mathematical demonstration 
nor as would a direct vision of God, such as we 
are told was granted to Moses. But there have 

152 



THE DIRECT VISION OF GOD 153 

been, and still are, not a few who do not need and 
may properly disdain arguments and proofs for 
the existence of God because they have, they 
believe, seen him in their souls as truly as Moses 
saw him on the mount. 

But does it follow because one does not possess 
the power to recognize the consciousness of God, 
that he cannot have any comfort in prayer, nor 
any assurance that God is present with him to 
hear and answer ? Certainly he can. Faith is 
not sight, but it is the assurance of things hoped 
for, the proving of things not seen. One can be- 
lieve in an invisible God, in his presence, in the 
influence of his Spirit, in guidance and inspiration. 
That is the lesson of the whole eleventh chapter of 
Hebrews. Such faith can give peace and even 
joy in him "whom not having seen we love; in 
whom, though now we see him not, yet believing 
we rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable and full 
of glory: receiving the end of our faith, even the 
salvation of our souls." 

If direct vision were generally given, no other 
evidence would be needed. But it is given to 
comparatively few of us. I have never had it, 
and in my younger days I used to seek and pray 
for it. It did not come, and I gave up the effort, 
believing that if God wanted me to have it he 
was good enough to give it without my straining 
further in prayer for it. But others say they 
have it, and if their testimony is to be accepted 



iS4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

that ends the matter. But that needs considera- 
tion, for there are chances of error. Meanwhile 
we hear the common petition in the pulpit and 
prayer-meeting that we may be conscious of the 
presence of God in our hearts. I never make that 
prayer. 

What is it to be conscious of the presence of 
God ? It is not to have faith in God, to believe 
he is present with us by his Spirit in our souls 
helping our infirmities and answering our prayers. 
Faith is not sight. But consciousness of God is 
to feel in the soul such a touch of his action on 
the soul that one will know that it is not the work- 
ing of his own imagination, but an external ap- 
pulse, as surely external as when we know that 
a friend is seen or heard. It is something more 
and other than feeling happy or exalted. It is the 
soul hearing the voice which we know is not our 
voice but God's voice. 

I do not think this is a very common experience, 
not nearly so common as is a peaceful reliance, 
trust, in the goodness of God. When it is found 
it is evidential ; but is it really found ? 

The seeking and finding of such spiritual ex- 
periences is what is called mysticism, and theology 
has made much of them of late. In past times 
it has taken the form, very much, of the effort 
to identify oneself with, to sink oneself in, the 
infinity of God. This is not an active but a pas- 
sive form of religion, and has had its widest 



THE DIRECT VISION OF GOD 155 

vogue in the Hindu Yoga, in which absorption in 
God induces indifference to the world and ascet- 
icism. The more usual form of mysticism is that 
which is less tending to Pantheism, and seeks to 
know God as one knows his neighbor, by recog- 
nizing God in his assured presence in the Soul. 

While such a consciousness of God is evidence 
enough of God to him who believes he has it, it 
can be no evidence to one who does not feel it, 
and who thinks the subject of it is mistaken and 
has simply imagined that a response had come 
from God to his desires. In dreams and in in- 
sanity alike one imagines what is not true, and 
there is with many an imaginative soul a stage 
midway between the two. We have had multi- 
tudes of cases in revivals of those who, after much 
excitement, have sought and found, they believed, 
the positive, recognized voice of God forgiving 
their sins, and they have fallen to the ground in 
an ecstasy of joy. Just as much the American 
Indian goes into the forest and fasts for days and 
nights till he has his response from the Great 
Spirit. Indeed, such experiences are most fre- 
quent with those, whether ignorant or cultivated, 
who have less of the rationalizing nature and more 
of the imaginative temperament. I am very sus- 
picious of such supposed experiences. I am my- 
self a complete rationalist in my religious faith, 
and desire to believe nothing that I do not under- 
stand and find a good reason for. One of my 



156 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

valued friends was a clergyman who in his old 
age developed the power of recognizing the re- 
sponse from God, and equally from his deceased 
wife, with whom he talked freely at night and 
whom he consulted on various personal matters. 
He had no doubt of her presence. I doubted; 
and equally I doubt in the cases of those who 
have this easily responsive, mystical nature. I 
do not envy their facile assurance ; I would rather 
trust cold, suspicious reason. 

I suppose religious mysticism is closely allied 
to a philosophical idealism which reduces even 
reality to thought. The world is God's thought; 
he thought it into existence. All we know is our 
thinking. We can think ourselves apart from 
anything material and into God. So in a new 
sense the world passes away and the fashion 
thereof. Hence the so-called New Thought, the 
Christian Science, Hindu swamis, and any re- 
ligious philosophy which can think suffering and 
sickness out of reality, and God in us and us in 
God. 

The assurance of the existence of God which 
comes out of first assuming God, and then by 
vigorous willing convincing oneself that one has 
a conscious experience of God, appears to me an 
abuse of reason and a fallacy, and may be danger- 
ous. By its claim to an immediacy of vision, its 
union of the soul with the Source of all being, it 
creates a superior class, a religious aristocracy, 



THE DIRECT VISION OF GOD 157 

above the rest of us who can reach no higher than 
loving submission and obedience to the heavenly 
Father, and with it have often come strange de- 
lusions to believe a lie. 

Closely allied to this mysticism, if not identical 
with it under a different name, is the teaching of 
the immanence of God, with its certain assurance, 
direct and unmistakable, of the existence of God. 
Yet under the teaching of immanence God is 
assumed as the substratum of all that is, the sup- 
porter and active agent in all nature, and particu- 
larly in the soul of man, so that in him we live 
and move and have our being in a very literal 
sense. I have heard intelligent people use its lan- 
guage and defend it when all they really meant 
by immanence was the old doctrine of the divine 
omnipresence and providence. Yet one can per- 
suade himself in using its language to believe that 
he has reached a real personal touch of his spirit 
with God. To me all this has no evidential value, 
and it is mainly, if I am not mistaken, an assump- 
tion rather than an experience. 

I can see that the assumption of the imma- 
nence of God in oneself and in nature may give 
comfort to certain souls who are ready to believe 
that they are a fragment of God, like a little 
island peak rising out of a vast, invisible, sub- 
marine mountain range. In such presumed im- 
manence, or idealistic monism, or whatever it 
may be called, there may such a relation with 



1 58 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

God be assumed or imagined that the individual 
may seem to recognize somehow that larger some- 
thing of which he is a part. It is beautiful thus 
to discover oneself to be a little uprush or out- 
burst of God. But what of the criminal man? 
It seems profane — it is nothing less than profane 
to think of a criminal as a small disfigurement ap- 
pearing on the visage of God. But what else 
is he? 

There are many who would say that conscious- 
ness of God is the strongest proof of God. Then 
the great multitude who have no such conscious- 
ness can have no such proof. Consciousness 
would be for the individual the final, conclusive 
proof. I never could cheat myself into feeling 
it. We must remember what such consciousness 
is. It is the recognition that you apprehend, feel, 
grasp God as something which you are sure is 
not yourself, which touches you from the outside ; 
just as when a person touches you you recognize 
his touch as something exterior to yourself, or 
when you hear your friend's voice you instantly 
recognize its otherness; you did not make that 
sound, it came to you from the outside. Now I 
have never felt clear that I could recognize an 
exterior stroke impinging on my mind which I in- 
stantly perceived was not of my own mind's origi- 
nation. That is what I mean by saying that I 
have never been conscious of God, and the great 
multitude of common people have never had this 



THE DIRECT VISION OF GOD 159 

proof of God, and are as incapable of having it as 
I am. It is the supposed possession of those only 
who either blunder in terms, or who simply re- 
peat a formula of words without knowing their 
meaning, or who identify their own mental proc- 
esses with the voice of God, or who are a genuine 
sort of mystics that have a mentality and a reach 
into the infinite above and about them which is 
special to them and beyond the reach of the com- 
mon mortal of this generation of objective reality 
and rational common sense. Theirs is instinct 
rather than reason. 

So I have no interest in the argument of con- 
sciousness, consciousness of a perception, which 
is itself the direct apprehension, grasping, laying 
hold of God, and which needs no other argument. 
That the world begs for argument of God is evi- 
dence that the world has no consciousness of 
God. I would not say it is impossible that any 
one should have immediate and real conscious- 
ness of God. There may be rare souls which 
have transcendental and transcendent power. 
Yet I doubt if they really have a gift not given to 
others. I know that imagination plays strange 
tricks. In some perfectly sane children imagina- 
tion is next to reality. And there are imaginative 
people who see visions and have experiences which 
are purely subjective, but which to them seem 
objective. I shrink from much of the stock 
phrases in religious conferences and prayer-meet- 



i6o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

ings about our communion with God, practising 
the God-habit, the consciousness of the divine pres- 
ence, which would be dangerous and fanatical, 
if it were not to be reduced, and practically is 
reduced, to its lowest terms of simple faith and 
love. 

Closely related to these doctrines of mysticism, 
though not itself mystical in spiritual experience, 
is the teaching of some that the idea of God is one 
of the fundamental principles of thought. They 
simply assume God as something bound up in the 
mind itself, so that whenever one thinks, he thinks 
with God in the background. If so, we need 
nothing further, but so far as I know it is not so 
with me, and the testimony of others will, I think, 
agree with mine. Nor do I see that the mind is 
so constituted that men must necessarily think 
on the basis of God, as they think on the basis of 
the axioms of geometry. Indeed, some people 
do not believe in God. 

Nor will I burden myself with trying to under- 
stand what is meant by absolute being, and as- 
serting the necessity of absolute being, and de- 
claring that absolute being is God. If absolute 
being means nothing more than being which ex- 
ists of its own necessity of being, the term is a 
needless mystification of thought. That there is 
being that exists by its own necessity of being I 
believe ; but I believe it because I know of finite, 
dependent, contingent existences, and there must 






THE DIRECT VISION OF GOD 161 

be back of all something which is not dependent, 
on which they depend. But this has been con- 
sidered in previous chapters. 

Another form of this argument is the claim that 
the mind possesses an inherent sense of truth, 
goodness, and beauty, and that there must be a 
perfect objective standard of truth, goodness, and 
beauty by which they are measured, as length is 
measured by a yardstick. These ideas certainly 
are inherent in the soul, but why that should in- 
volve the objective existence of a Being who is 
the standard of perfection in these attributes I 
fail to see. I imagine a perfect or an imperfect 
being, but one fancy no more than the other as- 
sures its existence in reality. The argument is 
too much like those for the Platonic ideas that 
exist realized in heaven, the substantive generic 
patterns of the things on the earth, or such as 
the Lord showed to Moses on the mount, copying 
which he was to build the Tabernacle. 

Neither am I convinced by the moral argu- 
ment, which asserts that there must be a great 
Being who in another world will correct all the 
inequalities and injustices of this present life; 
that the righteous man who has been buffeted all 
his life here will find, must find, that a great and 
infinite Ruler and Judge will by and by straighten 
all this out, that only thus can final justice be 
reached. So I believe and hope; but I fail to 
see why, in the nature of things, final equal jus- 



1 62 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

tice must be victor. Of course, after we have 
reached the conclusion that there is a God we 
will then say that he will lighten there the wrongs 
here; but before we have found a God to exist 
I do not see why it is necessary to assume that 
the present sufferings and defeats of the righteous, 
these miserable, often horrible inequalities and 
injustices here, must find a future Vindicator; 
any more than I can see why the inferior man, 
given the handicap of a low mentality, unable to 
be a Bacon, a Newton or a Shakespeare, should 
and must perforce in another world be given in 
justice an intellectual equality with the favored 
geniuses of this life. 

The arguments for theism considered in this 
chapter appear to me to rest mainly on the wish 
to believe, But the fact that we wish to believe 
in God, or immortality, or anything else, is no 
weighty evidence or none at all, in favor of such 
belief. It is of that fallacious pragmatic sort 
which holds that a belief is proved true by prov- 
ing that it would be a good thing to have it proved 
true. Science ever " refuses to regard our own 
desires, tastes, or interests as key to the under- 
standing of the world." 

I have no hesitation in writing this chapter 
caused by any fear of disturbing the faith of those 
who have been pleased to repeat the arguments 
which to me seem of little or no validity. They 
already believe, and nothing can disturb their 



THE DIRECT VISION OF GOD 163 

faith. They ask no reasons; their power to need 
or ask questions was long ago aborted. They re- 
joice in their inability to question. They are 
glad hearts without reserve or doubt, who, to 
change a word of an earlier mystic, may be de- 
scribed in his language: "Jam non consilio ere- 
dens, sed more eo perductus ut non tantum credere 
possim, sed nisi credere non possim." 

"No proofs henceforth I seek for my belief; 
For to such mind God's grace has lifted me 
That I not only can believe, but now 
Not to believe is quite impossible." 



CHAPTER XIV 
HOW TO THINK OP GOD 

IT is impossible by any arguments absolutely 
to demonstrate the existence of God. Some 
may doubt. Those only who believe they 
have in their souls a consciousness of God can 
therein find the demonstration which the rest of 
us must lack. It is the privilege of the few, and 
it is not easy to convince others that this con- 
scious apprehension of God as something other 
than themselves is not, or at least may not be, 
the product of a longing which finally creates 
within the mind the apparent fulfilment of its 
own desire. To be sure, we also have in our own 
sacred books, and in the sacred books of all re- 
ligions, accounts of the intervention of God, or 
the gods, in a way that would be conclusive of 
the divine existence; but no such interventions 
appear now, and questions inevitably arise as to 
the trustworthiness of such accounts. Miracles 
have ceased to be a convincing proof of God; 
they need proof; and we are and must be satisfied 
to depend for our faith in the existence of God 
on those proofs which we have considered, and 
on such as have satisfied the searchers after God. 

164 



HOW TO THINK OF GOD 165 

The common consent of mankind gives us the 
belief that there are one or more non-material 
superior existences, spiritual in their nature, which 
have power over material forces and over man- 
kind. Those existences, called gods, or God, have 
knowledge of us, and can be appealed to, placated 
or provoked, and can do us good or harm. They 
may have passions, as do we, good or bad, or the 
one God may be infinitely and changelessly wise, 
powerful, and good. Mankind conceives of its 
deities or Deity as like itself, only far superior, its 
highest ideal of what is noble and worthy, or even 
as the spiritual impersonation of its evil passions. 
As humanity grows in ethical sense out of savagery 
its gods gain quality until we reach the concep- 
tion of a single God, with no rival or competitor, 
infinitely wise and powerful, but also infinitely 
good. To him is ascribed the creation and the 
rule of the universe. In a sense it is true that 
man creates his God. His idea of God is of his 
own conception, and it grows in spirituality and 
moral quality with his own spiritual and moral 
growth. 

Christendom possesses this highest conception 
of God, first reached by Judaism. But we have 
not seen God walking in our gardens. We have 
no such physical evidence of him as we have of 
each other, and it is impossible that we, or at 
least most of us, should have. We must be con- 
tent, as in so many of our beliefs, with evidence 



166 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

of the probable sort. But that probability may- 
be enough to depend upon, enough for practical 
purposes; and such appears to me the evidence 
in support of God's existence drawn from the uni- 
verse of nature. To me it seems clear that there 
must have been a great First Cause, that the 
world of matter did not create itself, but had a 
creator, and equally that its co-ordinated laws 
had a contriver. Equally, the evidence presented 
in earlier chapters makes me believe that the world 
of life and the world of mind were guided by a 
superior intelligence rather than that they hap- 
pened to develop without intelligence or guidance. 

If in this conclusion I am right, I must have 
already learned from his works what is the nature 
and what the qualities, attributes, of God. What 
are his attributes ? 

I do not see that this question need raise any 
great difficulty. We need not flounder about in 
self-made mazes wondering about the absolute, 
or refuse to cross in thought an unbridged gulf 
between our finite and his infinite. Why create 
the gulf? We have bodies and souls; we know 
matter and mind, not relationless and absolute, 
but related to time and space. We know nothing 
else; we have no reason to believe there is any- 
thing else. "Vain wisdom all and false phi- 
losophy.' ' If our minds cannot comprehend the 
infinite they can at least apprehend it, and can 
understand that it is like what we know outside 



HOW TO THINK OF GOD 167 

of us, and are conscious of within ourselves, only 
more of it. We can know something of what 
God is, and be positive of it. 

And, first, all power is embraced in the first 
Great Cause. The whole course and force of 
nature came out from him. To be sure, we have 
not been able to find any evidence in the ether of 
space that it is not coterminal and cotemporal 
with time and space, boundless and eternal as 
God; but we have also found that it has been 
subject to an exterior power which out of this 
ether has created all things. Ether was the form- 
less and the void, the darkness upon the face of 
the deep, out of which God made light and the 
heaven and the earth. He that made all things 
is God. This is what we call omnipotence, for 
he that can do all this can do all things. This 
does not imply that he can do what in the nature 
of things it is impossible to do. Thus can God 
now cause that Woodrow Wilson, who was inaugu- 
rated President on March 4th, shall have been 
inaugurated on March 3d ? Can God cause that 
March 4th shall have come before March 3d ? 
Or that March 4th should be skipped, and there 
be no March 4th ? Can he abolish time ? 

Equally the Intelligence which knew how to 
contrive the numberless multiformities of nebulse 
and stars and solar systems, and equally the laws 
and forces of their constituent atoms ; and, further, 
the vital powers which create plants and animals, 



1 68 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

and could distribute intelligence and instinct to 
bee or man as needed, all appearing in due course 
under a system of law and a plan of development 
— that Intelligence must be without limit. It 
must cover all that can be known. It may not 
cover anything which in the nature of the case 
cannot be known, if such a thing there be; just 
as the divine omnipotence cannot do what is in 
essence impossible, as to make the three angles 
of a plane triangle equal to more than two right 
angles. Whether God, after giving freedom to a 
creature, can foresee what his every choice will 
be I am not sure. Nor is it important to decide 
that he can, for his wisdom is enough to meet any 
imaginable emergency ; or he may choose to leave 
all things without interference to the operation of 
his wise laws and the free choices of his creatures. 
All that can be known he does know. This we 
call omniscience. 

Another even more important quality or attri- 
bute assigned to the infinite power and intelli- 
gence whom we call God is goodness. Yet there 
are those, like John Stuart Mill, who have found 
in nature the evidences of a God of might and 
wisdom, but who could not, seeing the sin and 
suffering in his world, be assured of his stainless 
goodness. The assumed problem of a good God 
and a world of evil does not seem to me to need 
solving. That God is good is, I think, involved 
in his infinite wisdom. God would not be wise 



HOW TO THINK OF GOD 169 

if he were not good. I do not need to argue this 
to myself; nor am I affected by the fact that for 
us prudence and goodness seem sometimes to 
conflict, that to do right sometimes causes suffer- 
ing and wrong. But the elements of our little 
arc are insufficient to compute and describe his 
infinite circle. Our temporary loss may be swal- 
lowed up in a larger gain. The hermit thrush 
may be killed by the hawk, but it had a busy, 
blissful life of sweet song, and it was best that 
thrush and lark and hawk and deer and wolf and 
man should die and make room for others of their 
kind; and the sum of their happiness was good. 
It was best that the law of life and death should 
rule, without exception for suffering's sake. The 
suffering was incidental; it was good to live. 

" For who would lose, 
Though full of pain, this intellectual being, 
These thoughts that wander through eternity, 
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost 
In the wide womb of uncreated night ?" 

It is the drift of life we must consider when we 
think of suffering, not its eddies ; the whole orbit, 
not its epicycles; the rule, not its exceptions; 
and the prevailing rule and drift of life is not 
suffering, but enjoyment, so that life is sweet. 
The chief appeal of both religion and ethics is 
to well folks. And I hold that moral evil is not 
predominant. Even bad people are likely to do 



i 7 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

more good things than bad. To be sure, they 
do many bad things; much sin is in the world, 
and a good God cannot be pleased with it; but 
I am not sure that he can help it. He cannot 
make a thing to be and not to be at the same 
time; and I am not clear that he can make men 
who shall be free and yet not free to sin. It 
would hardly be worth while to have a world and 
yet no place planned in it for free moral beings; 
not worth while to create man, and not let him 
sin as he chose. That is, as many have said 
before me, while it is clear that God might have 
refused to create, it is not clear that if he created 
beings with moral natures and possessed of free 
will, he could have excluded sin. And equally it 
is not clear that if God gave rules of law to the 
world of matter and the world of life, a reign of 
law that we can depend upon, he could have ex- 
cluded suffering. The sum of enjoyment, and 
equally the sum of goodness, may be — I doubt 
not it is and will be — much greater than the by- 
products, the remnants, the offal, the slag and 
cinders of suffering and sin. The bad is sad, 
very sad, I know, but the good in fatherhood and 
motherhood and childhood, in love and fellow- 
ship and help, in health and useful work, is much 
greater; and I do not feel the need to solve 
studied riddles and " justify the ways of God to 
man." I find no difficulty in believing that God 
is good beyond limit, as well as powerful and wise. 



HOW TO THINK OF GOD 171 

These qualities of power, wisdom, and good- 
ness belong not to matter, but to mind. When we 
then formulate our belief as to the nature of God 
we have already thought of him as a spirit, a real 
personality possessed of the same kind of mind 
as is ours, with intellect to know, feeling to love, 
and will to create. God is a spirit; there is no 
question of that. 

But can he be more than a spirit ? We have 
both spirit and body; can God have both? He 
is not matter as known to us, and in his activity 
he transcends and embraces all matter. Yet one 
exception to this statement we have observed. 
So far as we can judge, his infinity does not tran- 
scend the infinity of ether in space and time. 
Ether appears to be infinite in extent and infinite 
in past and future duration. Then it is conceiva- 
ble that it may have a special relation to the in- 
finite spirit. We may conceive of ether as the 
agency through which God works, just as our 
souls work through our bodies; or we might even, 
for the moment, ask whether ether can of itself 
be spiritual and of the nature of God. It will 
not be easy to accept the latter view if we allow 
the conclusion of most physicists at present that 
matter in its ultimate elements is simply a modi- 
fication of ether. All the present studies of ether, 
with its various waves for transmitting force, 
tend to make it clear that its alliance is not with 
mind, but with the familiar forms of matter. 



1 72 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

We may, to be sure, possibly think of ether as 
having special relations to the Supreme Spirit, 
but not as itself the Supreme Spirit; not, as 
Haeckel would have it, that ether is God. God's 
nature, shown by his attributes, is plainly that 
of spirit. 

It is obviously of the nature of God as a self- 
existent being that his existence should be infinite 
in time. The necessity of his existence always 
has been and always will be. That is, he is the 
eternal God. 

He would also of his own nature be universal 
in his being, in one place as well as another, cov- 
ering all space. We know very little as to the 
way in which spirit localizes itself; but in what- 
ever way, in whatever sort of consciousness or 
intelligence it acts, no place is exempt from the 
activity of a necessarily existent spirit. The 
necessity of his existence is universal. That is 
what we call the divine omnipresence. 

How, then, am I to think of God ? I think of 
him as the original substratum of the universe, 
the self-existent, co-eternal of eternity, that from 
which all came; yet not as an abstract, non-rela- 
tioned essence, but as a real, concrete intelligence 
and will, that stands behind all material things 
which he has devised, created, and rules. How 
he rules them we may not know, except that he 
does it in accordance with the laws of nature. 
We see no exception to those laws, and to every 



HOW TO THINK OP GOD 173 

appearance nature has been put under them and 
automatically obeys them. So I do not think of 
God as the constantly active volitional agent in 
every smallest and largest attraction and repul- 
sion of nature, but as author of its laws and pre- 
siding over them. I think of those laws as secur- 
ing the beneficence of the seasons, and also the 
paroxysms of tornado and earthquake, and I do 
not think of these as separate and individual 
choices and volitions of God. 

I think of God as infinitely good, as an intensely 
moral being, loving the right and by his nature 
pledged to its victory, and equally hating the 
wrong and pledged to its defeat. I think of him 
as faultlessly and redundantly good, actively so 
whether that activity is exercised by the process 
of his laws or by his supervision over them. 
Suffering is but the necessary and undesired by- 
product of his wise and good laws. Only sin is 
the alien act of man's hostile free will. 

Thus I think of God as a spirit eternal, universal, 
pervasive, and active, as a personal being, in his 
power, wisdom and goodness. But the question 
must still arise as to the way of his relation to 
the world he rules. The mind constantly recurs 
to that other infinity apparently as pervasive as 
God, as eternal as God, which we call ether. 
What, then, is its relation to God ? 

I cannot know, but when I think of ether as 
the probable source of everything, of every atom 



i 7 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

of matter in the universe, of earth and stars as 
made out of ether; and of every sort of force, not 
of light only, but of electricity and gravity as 
well, as depending on the strain of ether; the 
earth carried by ether about the sun, as well as 
the apple drawn to the ground; of every physical 
or chemical or vital activity resting in the eternal 
force of ether; of ether never displaced by matter 
but identified with it as the air is identified with 
its eddies or the ocean with its waves, it seems not 
unlikely that the Infinite Spirit somehow works 
in and through ether as our souls act through 
our bodies. Would it be illegitimate to think of 
ether as in a sense the body of God, God the spirit, 
and yet at the same time the universe God ? I 
have no opinion. I do not believe such to be the 
fact, nor do I disbelieve it, for I have no evidence 
— it is a mere conjecture. Yet it seems some- 
what plausible. At least we know that God does 
nothing outside of ether and its modifications. 
In ether he is omnipresent. 

The conjecture is not pantheistic. It would 
be if God were not thought of as also a controlling 
spirit, as with us the mind rules the body. It is 
— is it not ? — a fact that God lives and works in 
ether, as we live and work in our physical bodies. 
It would thus follow that other spirits and our 
own souls may yet live and act in a direct sense 
in God, in the same space, the same ether, the 
same God who fills all things. 



HOW TO THINK OF GOD 175 

And may we not wonder, and perhaps learn 
some 'day, whether the ether is not the medium 
in its strain by which our spirit, our will, acts on 
our physical structure ? We know that it is 
through strain in the ether that physical move- 
ments are secured; why may not the mind act 
on and through ether? Are we quite sure that 
the mind is not itself a modification of ether ? 
just as the electron is ? Thus we might conceive 
of the beasts as having an ether soul to be com- 
pared with the low combining weight of hydrogen 
while the human soul is complex, like an organic 
molecule, and the vital soul of the tree is inert, 
like argon. We do not know, but at least the 
conjecture is plausible that, as the ether is only 
semimaterial, it may be that my mind creates 
a current, a wave, in the ether, and this semi- 
immaterial ether is the conducting-link between 
my immaterial mind and my material body. It 
is as good a conjecture as any, and is in line with 
phenomena not yet explained, in which, if a 
multitude of apparently well authenticated tales 
are true, telepathic influence has been conveyed 
from one mind to another far distant — wireless 
telegraphy through ether. I do not accept it as 
based on any real evidence, but I am allowed the 
conception of God as an infinite spirit, residing in 
infinite ether, acting in it, working through it, 
ether as really himself, as our bodies are ourselves, 
converting it into matter or mind, and controlling 



176 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

it by his will. Thus I may dare to conceive of 
ether as in a sense the body of God, and may con- 
jecture that when God made all things out of 
ether he made them not out of nothing, as men 
have been wont to say, but out of himself; and 
yet I would conceive of the ether out of which 
everything is made, as God only in the lower 
sense in which I speak of my body as myself, 
when it is only the organ by which the J, that is, 
my mind, reaches its purposes. 

But who by searching can find out God ? His 
infinity dazes us; his power and his wisdom awe 
us; and at the vision of his dread holiness we 
cry, "Woe is me," till the live coal from off the 
altar glows with his goodness, his boundless, end- 
less mercy and love. Then the spaciousness of 
his existence, the mystery of his wisdom, and his 
resistless power all appear but as the serving satel- 
lites of his regnant goodness ; and we, finite souls, 
dust in his balance, can only praise and pray. 
Thus it is, that when we would try in thought 
to compass God, thought rises to worship. 






CHAPTER XV 
DUTY AND DUTIES 

THE doctrine of duty is a very large sub- 
ject, and might properly require volumes 
to discuss it adequately. In a single chap- 
ter one can do no more than lay down some main 
principles. 

Duty has a dual aspect. It has to do with 
the doer and with that to which the doing is done. 
There must be a subject and an object ; and usu- 
ally the object will be other than the subject, 
although it may be that one owes and performs 
duties which have relation solely to oneself. 

As soon as one has relations to some one else 
duties begin; and duty becomes as primary, as 
obligatory, as necessary, as are geometrical truths. 
A person may be so stupid as not to see them, 
just as an ignorant person may not recognize a 
simple geometrical truth; but moral culture will 
bring out the applications of duty, and show what 
is right and what is wrong. There are no tribes 
so low that they do not recognize that there are 
obligations, and that some things are right and 
some other things wrong. The comprehensive 
law which embraces all duty is the exercise of 

177 



178 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

good-will, of love to others, with its corollary that 
ill-will, disregard of others' welfare, is wrong. 

If we should choose to believe that duty rests 
in seeking enjoyment, or in the perfecting of one's 
own powers, or in obedience to the customs or 
laws of society, even as the words ethics and morals 
come from Greek and Latin words meaning cus- 
toms, even so the customs are supposed to be 
right because for the welfare of society; or one's 
developing of himself is of value as it helps the 
community; or the enjoyment sought is the usual 
measure of benefit to others. It is the welfare 
of the commonwealth or of its members individu- 
ally that duty requires us to consider. 

In previous chapters we have considered God 
as the creator of the world. As soon as God cre- 
ated sentient life he had duties toward it. Before 
such creation, if there was any such time within 
eternity, he may be imagined as being alone, but 
having a nature which knew and approved, by 
anticipation, any duty which might arise. When 
he created, he created out of a sense of duty, of 
love to what he should create. It may not be 
easy to designate any particular duties he might 
have toward ether, or nebulae, or the sun and 
moon, toward grass and trees; but as soon as 
intelligent human beings appeared, or in antic- 
ipation of them, duties developed. Duties are 
reciprocal; but God's duties to man whom he 
has made are prior to man's duties to God. 






DUTY AND DUTIES 179 

It is a very serious thing for us to attempt to 
measure God's obligation to his creatures, but at 
least we can say, notwithstanding our ignorance, 
as compared with his omniscience: " Shall not the 
Judge of all the earth do right ?" 

God's duties, be it, then, reverently spoken, 
must be embraced under the term of loving care. 
Other terms, such as justice, righteousness, holi- 
ness, express but incomplete phases of what in 
toto is love. So the best human figure under which 
to represent God's relation to his creatures is that 
of a father, not lord nor king. How God should 
exercise his fatherly love to us we cannot ante- 
cedently say; but we know he is good, and we 
know what he has done for us in nature. His 
obligation to us he has fulfilled by putting nature 
under beneficial laws that we can trust, and then 
bidding us depend on their certainty. Enough of 
these laws are so clear to the humblest under- 
standing, those of the seasons and the growth of 
vegetation, that the lowest primitive savage could 
know them and live a happy and busy life. After 
only two hundred generations, if the life of man 
goes back six thousand years, or two thousand 
if the race has lived sixty thousand years, we have 
learned how to use more completely many of the 
occult laws of nature, and the millions of years 
yet to come will see manifold generations multi- 
plying upon the earth with ever happier life. We 
may rest in the assurance that the heavenly 



i8o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Father will do all that his wisdom sees is best for 
man made in his image ; and we may indulge the 
eternal hope, notwithstanding the gift of free will, 
that somehow and at some time moral evil will 
drop out of the world. Physical suffering we may 
hope will continue as long as man has a body and 
can grow strong by patience and struggle. 

While I must believe that the duties of a crea- 
tor to his creatures are prior to the duties of the 
creature to the creator, yet it is the latter with 
which we are mostly concerned. We can depend 
upon it that what is right he will do, and we can 
leave that to him. Our chief concern is with 
our duties to him. 

(a) I have said that the evidence which nature 
gives us of the existence of God is probable evi- 
dence, and not absolutely demonstrative, although 
the weight of probability seems to me to be such 
as to be practically conclusive. Now, in the case 
of action on probable evidence, two considera- 
tions must guide our conduct: one, the amount 
of evidence, whether great or small; and the 
other, the importance of the subject involved in 
the evidence. The stronger the evidence the 
greater the obligation; and equally, the serious- 
ness of the subject must goverti the attention we 
give to it. An unimportant conclusion, even 
though probable, may be slighted or neglected; 
but even a slight degree of probability on such a 
subject as this, the existence of God, even were 



DUTY AND DUTIES 181 

there a larger probability against it, could not 
prudently or rightly be overlooked, much more 
with the prevailing evidence that there exists a 
God with whom we have to do. It is a first duty 
for man to recognize his relation to the infinite 
will and infinite goodness above him. One who 
does not concern himself with such a God in 
whom he yet believes acts as if he were mad. 

(&) The next duty we have toward the God who 
is our Father is that of reverence and love, rev- 
erence for his greatness, love answering to his 
love. These feelings are much more than a sense 
of grandeur or an approval of goodness ; they are 
directed to God as personal, loving, fatherly, and 
respond with love to his love. If we believe in 
such a God, and feel so toward him, we shall ex- 
press ourselves in honor shown to him and in 
the filial fellowship with him of prayer and praise. 

(c) Both prudence and duty — for prudence is 
a part of duty — require that we should act in 
such a way as to secure the good-will of such a 
God. We give him a character that rises to our 
highest ideal of goodness. Our duty is to come 
up to that ideal, as far as we can, and so please 
him. We also allow to his infinite goodness the 
support of infinite wisdom and power. If we are 
his creatures, dependent on him, it is simple pru- 
dence to make him our friend. He will love our 
goodness; and if we are evil his infinite nature 
will oppose us and defeat us; and a sad thing it 



182 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

would be to make ourselves enemies of the loving, 
yet holy God. Nor is this the attitude of selfish- 
ness. Our own love of goodness would ally us 
with the God of all goodness, and would compel 
and obligate us to love and follow him. When we 
love and serve infinite goodness as represented 
in God, we are loving our own ideal creation. 
More than that, if there were no God we should 
be required by our own sense of right to follow 
goodness and a merely ideal God in a stern and 
stoic way. A man has no right, even apart from 
God, to disobey his ideal of justice and kindness 
and love. Much more when he believes in God, 
and such a God, will it be his duty to reverence 
him, to learn his will and to obey him, both be- 
cause he is the infinite God and because one's 
belief in the moral character of God corresponds 
with his own highest ideals of what is right. But 
beyond obedience due to one's own highest ideals, 
which is ethics, will be obedience and service due 
to God himself, which is religion. 

As a part of the duty to act in such a way as 
to secure the good- will of God, will be the obliga- 
tion, also supported by self-interest, to learn his 
will. To be sure, the will of God will be identical 
with the requirements of our own highest moral 
standards, but those standards alone, obeyed or 
disobeyed, have, apart from God, no force of ben- 
efit or loss beyond one's satisfaction or dissatis- 
faction with himself, the approval or disapproval 



DUTY AND DUTIES 183 

of one's fellow men, the laws of one's country and 
the laws of nature. But disobedience to one's 
ethical standards may be secret and find no pun- 
ishment, only the pleasure or success desired; 
while one's obedience may involve great incon- 
venience, or, as has often been the case, may be 
at the sacrifice of life. In such cases it will be a 
very strenuous soul, and an unusual one, which 
will obey the impulse of its own sense of duty un- 
supported by the sense of loyalty to a superior 
power who must be obeyed. Such souls there 
doubtless are who will do right without regard to 
God: 

" There are who ask not if thine eye 
Be on them, who in love and truth 
Where no misgiving is rely 

Upon the genial sense of youth; 
Glad hearts without reproach or blot 
Who do Thy work and know it not." 

But those who believe in God usually need to 
add to the incitements of their own moral nature 
a sense of the sure purpose of God to maintain 
in his own rule of the universe the moral laws 
which he obeys and wills to have obeyed by his 
creatures. Inasmuch as the belief in God as a 
personal spirit is closely related to belief in the 
future existence of our own personal souls, one 
who believes in God and immortality must seek 
to know what is right, to keep it in mind, to obey 



i8 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

it in conduct, because it is the will of God, and he 
must have regard to his verdict and award; and 
that is a consideration far higher than that which 
we read in the noble words of Cicero written to 
his friend Atticus, when anxious about his duty 
to the falling state: ''What will history say of me 
six hundred years hence ? That is a thing which 
I fear much more than the petty group of those 
who are alive to-day.' ' Those who fail to keep 
God and the eternal life before them are likely to 
sink into that hopeless and irresolute attitude so 
well expressed by Paul, "If the dead rise not," 
"let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." 

(d) Other duties to God may arise or seem to 
arise, which follow only indirectly from the knowl- 
edge of his existence, but they are formal, cere- 
monial, and not basic. One may properly believe 
that God requires the sacrifice of oxen, sheep, 
and turtle-doves, or that he demands payment of 
tithes, or worship in a temple, or the hallowing of 
a day, or a certain manner and time of prayer. 
These will then be duties toward God, and will be 
purely religious. The obligation to perform these 
acts will depend on the evidence we have that 
God requires them. They are not fundamental; 
a change as to the evidence of their being the will 
of God will change the duty. On these subjects 
we may differ. "Let every man be fully per- 
suaded in his own mind." Some such duties may 
arise as the natural concomitant of belief in God. 



DUTY AND DUTIES 185 

Particularly the privilege of prayer may also be 
a duty, and also some form of public worship 
and fellowship in work to give a knowledge of 
God to those ignorant of him, and to persuade 
those who neglect him to recognize and obey 
him. Also those duties which are based on our 
relation to our fellow men, usually embraced under 
the term morals, are religious duties in so far as 
they are seen to be required by the will of God and 
are performed in obedience to him. Accordingly 
in the higher sense all duty is religion, as in a 
wider sense all religion is duty. 



CHAPTER XVI 

DUTIES BETWEEN MAN AND MAN 

I HAVE already recorded my conviction that 
the sense of right and wrong is inherent in our 
nature, and is not anything to be argued and 
proved. The rule of right, as I have said, is good- 
will, benevolence, love; as the absence of these, 
or the presence of their opposites, ill will, malev- 
olence, selfishness, is of the essence of wrong. 
It has also been mentioned that duties arise as 
soon as relations arise between intelligent beings. 
The previous chapter has considered the recip- 
rocal duties of God and man ; the present chapter 
is concerned with the duties of men to each other. 
To be sure, some duties to our fellow men may 
depend on our duty to God, or may be evidenced 
by such duty to God, in which case they will 
belong both to religion and to morals. Such 
would be a duty to bring men to the knowledge of 
God; but independently of and apart from God, 
duty to our human brothers arises of itself and 
would exist if there were no God. 

This sense of duty we call conscience. I 
would define it, in its more general meaning, as 
including both the sense of obligation to show good- 

186 



DUTIES BETWEEN MAN AND MAN 187 

will to others, whether God or man, and, next, 
the more or less intelligent effort to obey that 
sense of obligation. Properly it is only the for- 
mer element which is conscience, while the lat- 
ter is guided by reason, and may be mistaken. 
The sense of obligation may be very strong, and 
is always imperative, while reason may be wo- 
fully mistaken as to what God requires, or what 
would be of benefit to mankind. Men have be- 
lieved that God required the sacrifice to him of 
every first-born child, and the father and mother 
properly obeyed their conscience in the hideous 
rite. A multitude of such infants have lately 
been found in the excavation of Amorite cities of 
Palestine. 

Thus what is right in one generation becomes 
wrong in another, owing to better views, under 
new conditions, of what is of benefit to humanity. 
Even from our fathers' days we have learned this. 
Fifty years ago multitudes in our own country 
believed slavery to be right, an ordinance of God, 
and our Constitution indorsed it; now the whole 
world condemns it; and, coming down to our 
own times, we have only to read our political plat- 
forms to learn that financial and commercial pro- 
cedures which nobody condemned, and the best 
of men engaged in, are now regarded as wrong 
and are made illegal. We are now in the very 
welter of discussion as to moral questions, by 
which I do not mean the obligation to do right, 



1 88 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

to do what is for the public weal, but the question 
what is for the public welfare, which when found 
we will obey. With the changing condition of so- 
ciety I expect great changes in our ideas of what 
is right, and those changes may be very radical. 
All this subject of duty to our neighbor comes 
under the head of morals, by which I mean the 
exercise of duties toward our fellow men; while 
ethics has a wider meaning, and covers the whole 
realm of duty, theoretic or practical, to mankind 
or to any other beings whatever. 

Under an analysis of our definition of morals, 
as the exercise of the duty of good-will to our 
fellow men, we may embrace the individual duties 
which we should exercise; and we may consider 
them as duties to oneself, duties to individuals 
generally, duties to our families, duties to the 
social or business association of which we are a 
part, duties to our town, state, or nation, and 
duties to the world as a whole. 

(a) And first our duties to ourselves. These 
depend chiefly on their bearing upon our ability 
to perform in the best way our duties to others. 
All is embraced in the duty to make the very best 
of our powers so that we can use them to the 
greatest advantage for the benefit of others. It 
means the preservation of a clean, pure, and 
healthy body, such as will disgust no one, and 
infect no one; and this means the planning for a 
long life of usefulness. It means the abstention 



DUTIES BETWEEN MAN AND MAN 189 

from alcoholics and narcotics, and with this I 
would include tobacco as well as alcohol and 
opium. It means abundance of food, abundance 
of exercise, and abundance of sleep; it does not 
mean time wasted in any of these good things. 
There must be recreation and pleasant discourse, 
but these are subsidiary to larger purposes. 

It means still more the very best attainable 
culture of our minds by education, and of our 
wills by the exercise of our powers, so that we 
may learn to do in the best way possible to us 
the duties incumbent upon us. Those duties dif- 
fer, as our natural powers differ. There is great 
difference between us in mind as well as body, 
and some are fitted to lead well, and others to fol- 
low well. Particularly in youth is it our duty to 
use all our effort to equip ourselves for future ser- 
vice. An infant can do nothing but eat and sleep 
and grow; the main duties of the child — not by 
any means all — are to grow in mental power and 
in moral purpose by study and by useful labor, 
getting ready to fill as high a field of service as 
possible. That field may be as leader of men, or 
it may be in filling quite as conscientiously some 
of those ordinary and limited fields of service 
which in the nature of things must come to most 
of us. With what we can reach we must be satis- 
fied, and fortunately are satisfied. I know I am 
not competent to be President of the United 
States, or president of a bank or of a board of 



190 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

trade, and I don't envy such fortunate people or 
envy their position or wealth. I believe that for 
one's own character, to make the best of one- 
self, every one — artisan, toiler, professional man, 
master, mistress, or servant — should give his ser- 
vice not stintedly, but generously and liberally, 
and with a happy mind. 

I believe that to cultivate one's body or mind 
or soul just for one's own pleasure or improvement 
is unworthy and selfish. One can be an intellec- 
tual as well as a physical inebriate, all intoxicated 
with his own selfish satisfaction, and, because use- 
less to others, stunted in his own soul, drunk with 
conceit of himself, incapable of measuring larger 
values. One's duty to oneself forbids him to live 
such a life. 

(6) Our duties to other human beings generally 
may be briefly stated. They are embraced in 
what has been called the love of benevolence as 
distinguished from the love of complaisance, that 
is, of general good-will as distinguished from spe- 
cial affection. It means that as we have oppor- 
tunity we will do such service as we can, even if it 
be but giving a smile, while it may be as much as 
the Samaritan did for the man who fell among 
thieves. 

(c) The family is the most important, the most 
intimate unit of which society is composed, and 
no duties are more important than those related 
to the family. On the family rests the continua- 






DUTIES BETWEEN MAN AND MAN 191 

tion of the human race upon the earth; and as 
humanity is more of value than all the rest of the 
universe we know put together, its succession of 
births to replace deaths is of the first importance, 
not second even to that of preserving individual 
life. It is desirable, then, that all should marry, 
and it is desirable and necessary that, in order to 
maintain the present population, even without 
increase, every married pair should have three 
children, two to replace themselves, and one more 
to allow for the chance that one-third will die 
before reaching the age of marriage. Of course 
many of marriageable age will unfortunately never 
marry, and more than three children will be neces- 
sary for each couple in order to fill up their lack 
of duty. I believe it is desirable that marriage 
should not be long delayed after the parties reach 
marriageable age, and that it is a great misfortune 
that present social conditions tend to delay mar- 
riage to an age when the parties are more averse 
to having children, and have learned how pru- 
dently to limit their number. Particularly do I 
believe it is the duty of the more ambitious and 
better educated to desire large families. The 
abler in brain and body a man and wife, the more 
imperative their duty to leave many to inherit 
their ability. This duty is higher than any duty 
to themselves. 

I believe that the laws of marriage belong to 
the state and not to the church, except as all 



1 9 2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

things are to be judged by the church. We have 
reached the blessed condition of peace in which 
the number of the sexes is measurably equalized 
and monogamy prevails. But in a barbarous 
period, when the men were killed off in war, it 
was best for the state that polygamy should pro- 
vide homes for the superfluous women, that their 
children might replace the loss by war. Monog- 
amy is best for us now, but that implies that 
somehow early marriage for all of reasonable 
health should be provided, and possibly assured. 
It is the advantage to society that should fix 
legislation as to marriage, and also divorce. 
While the rights of parents and children should 
be rigidly protected, I can see no reason why 
divorce should not be allowed in cases in which, 
by the fault of either party, marriage proves a 
curse rather than a blessing. Unfaithfulness to 
the marriage bond is an injustice to the innocent 
party, and a proper cause for divorce; and other 
acts of injustice, such as cruelty or desertion, are 
just as truly such. I also believe that the main- 
tenance of freely accessible houses of prostitution 
in our cities is a fearful evil, that it is a shocking 
impediment to marriage, a distributer of disease, 
and that its existence anywhere is a burning dis- 
grace to the community. 

The virtues that attend marriage are familiar 
to us — affection, chastity, parental care, and thrift. 
In marriages, husband and wife overcome selfish- 



DUTIES BETWEEN MAN AND MAN 193 

ness by loving each other and their children more 
than they love themselves. It is a narrow circle, 
but within that circle it cultivates the sweetest 
virtues, and educates each for the wider expres- 
sions of good-will. 

(d) But it is a stingy soul that confines its affec- 
tions within the limits of a single family. We 
ought to be interested in our neighbors. Our 
business and our residence embrace others than 
the members of our own households. We are in 
churches, clubs, societies, unions, established for 
the very purpose of helping one another. Every 
such fellowship enlarges or should enlarge the 
heart. It need not dissipate the love of family, 
but it tends to make family love less selfish, and 
teaches us to consider the duty of serving others. 
Particularly those labor organizations which are 
formed for the purpose of mutual support and the 
defense of the interests of the members, teach loy- 
alty and self-sacrifice, and are of moral benefit to 
the members when kept within legitimate limits. 
But what is generous toward fellow members 
may become ungenerous and cruel in its bellig- 
erent treatment of those not members. We have 
seen such unions, whose purpose is beautiful be- 
cause helpful, perverted to help each other by 
outrage and murder. But that is the old story 
which the war spirit has taught our people, that 
they can benefit themselves by slaughtering by 
the thousand those of other nations. 



i94 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

(e) That is a yet wider loyalty which we prop- 
erly cultivate as members of a town, city, state, 
or nation, and we call it civic pride or patriotism. 
It is a true adage that it is sweet and beautiful 
to die for one's country. A noble virtue is patri- 
otism, because it represents a wide expansion of 
good-will toward the entire body of citizens of 
which the patriot is one; and it is displayed in 
all its glory in the event of war, which risks the 
sacrifice of life itself. And yet its perversion is 
the occasion of more wrongs than almost anything 
else. It teaches us, too often, in the love of our 
own people to hate those of another race or na- 
tion, Chinese, Italians, Irishmen, Jews, Negroes; 
and in war it allows of every atrocity. It is this 
narrow, pestiferous perversion of the patriotic 
spirit which shows itself in race pride and race 
prejudice, which makes for our nation all its 
troubles in the South, in Porto Rico, and the 
Philippines; with China and Japan, and which 
gives England her troubles in India and South 
Africa, and which in war makes nations hate and 
murder each other. But at times the beautiful 
spirit of patriotism is met and conquered, when it 
descends to narrowness, by the equally beautiful 
and equally narrow spirit of class loyalty, as when 
in France and Germany, forgetting their old na- 
tional hostilities, the Socialists met and declared 
that they would allow no war between the na- 
tions, for the love of humanity is greater than 



DUTIES BETWEEN MAN AND MAN 195 

the love of nation. Yet in the terrible European 
war we have seen this more generous class loyalty 
swept aside by a torrent of perverse patriotism. 

(/) So I come back where I began, to the 
good-will toward all men individually and gener- 
ally, as the true inclusive virtue and duty. Un- 
perverted, the love of family, of class, of town or 
nation is beautiful, but true virtue is not limited. 
Limit is vice. The enlarged soul will have inter- 
ests in all the nations of the earth, will rejoice to 
learn of their progress and welfare, will seek in 
some way to bring them into a better knowledge 
of God, to a truer education, to a fuller liberty, 
and will not confine one's interest to one's own 
family, section, or nation. Herein lies the obli- 
gation of Christian missions, a chief, if not the 
chief duty of those who accept the teachings of 
love taught us by our Lord, and who believe 
Christianity is the best of all boons for the world. 
Here duty to man coincides with duty to God. It 
is not limited to carrying the blessings of religion 
to the people of our own country, called home 
missions; it is far greater than that, for it em- 
braces the most distant, the most benighted, the 
least attractive of all earth's races, because its 
love is unlimited, is all-embracing. It sends those 
who can go to redeem paganism or savagery. It 
is the radiant blossom of Christianity, the broadest 
expression of essential and undistinguishing love. 
It is the performance of the fullest duty to all our 



iq6 what i believe axd why 

brother men, and also of duty to Him who asks: 
"Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" 
Ye: ever with this proviso must we judge of 
duty, that it must be measured by opportunity. 
It is only the privilege of education and culture 
that allows a man to embrace the whole world in- 
telligently in the arms of Lis love One who is 
ignorant of all beyond the meagre circuit of his 
:n can love only what he sees. Then let him 
love his ball club, or his shopmates up to his 
little limit. That is his virtue, his duty, and let 
his children go to school, study geography, read 
the foreign news in the daily paper, and be better 
than their fathers, not because they love be::er. 
but because they love more widely. 



CHAPTER XVII 

ESSENTIALS AND NON-ESSENTIALS IN 
RELIGION 

THERE are many doctrines, or dogmas, that 
cannot be included in so restricted a series 
of chapters as the present on "What I Be- 
lieve and Why," because it is not important to 
have any belief about them; and of some of them 
it is impossible to have evidence, other than that 
which is drawn from a mechanical view of Scrip- 
ture; and others as to which we may profitably 
leave knowledge to God, as the knowledge can 
have no concern to us, but only to him. 

Of those of which it is not important that we 
should have any belief, we may take one com- 
monly held in the Catholic Church, that of the 
Assumption of the Virgin Mary, that is, the doc- 
trine that came into vogue about the time of the 
Nestorian controversy, and the development of 
honor to Mary as "the mother of God," but 
which had its origin in a Gnostic heresy, and held 
that she was taken up, both body and soul, by 
angels into heaven. There is not a bit of evi- 
dence for it from Scripture or from any other 
source. It is a pure invention of fancy. 

Equally of no importance to us, and equally 

197 



198 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

without Biblical or other evidence, is the dogma 
of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, 
a belief which grew out of the notion that the 
mother of our Lord must have been too immacu- 
late to have inherited any stain of original sin 
from our first parents. It depends on another 
doctrine, that of the original inherited corruption 
of human nature from Adam, which itself needs 
proof. 

Some other doctrines taught in certain creeds 
have no proof whatever, but would be of impor- 
tance if true. Such is that propounded by the 
Vatican Council declaring the infallibility of the 
Pope, in his official declarations of doctrine. If 
he is thus infallible it is important that we should 
know it. But there being no proof of it, and its 
unlikelihood being very great, it is not important 
to dwell upon it. In a similar class we may cite 
the value of indulgences and the doctrine of 
purgatory. 

It is desirable for us to know as many true 
things as possible, but we cannot know them all. 
Some are important and some unimportant. As 
to some, if we do not know them correctly it is 
death to us, while as to others we may err without 
mischief. It is also desirable that we should do 
as many good things as possible, but some good 
things it is of much more importance that we 
should do than that we should do others. It is 
more important to save a child's life than a dog's. 



ESSENTIALS AND NON-ESSENTIALS 199 

In the field of theology, which has to do with 
beliefs, and in that of religion, which has to do 
with character and conduct, there are doctrines 
or duties of various grades of value, some impor- 
tant, some of little importance; and, what is 
more to the purpose, the duties relating to con- 
duct are vastly more important than the beliefs. 
We value the ignorant man, if good, vastly more 
than the knowing man, if bad. Virtue is more 
than learning, but the complete man has both. 

We may not be under obligation to have 
knowledge ; we are under obligation to have char- 
acter. And character is simple, within the reach 
of everybody. It is nothing more than to do the 
most good things one can, but only within the 
limits of one's knowledge. His knowledge may 
be very imperfect, and his belief quite wrong, but 
a man must follow according to what he knows. 
Abraham, as the story goes, thought it his duty, 
because he believed God required it, to kill his 
first-born, and he prepared to do it, as thousands 
of Canaanites actually did. It was his duty. 
Of course, God never commanded any such thing 
— he could not do it, but that did not make the 
action wrong; for misbelief made it right to lift 
the knife. Thus a thousand cruel acts in pagan 
worship are made pious and praiseworthy, and 
are doubtless acceptable to God. It is a comfort 
to think so, while we try to enlighten ignorance 
and make the world happier and better. 



2oo WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

As all conduct and duty depend on our rela- 
tions to others, to God or our fellow men, our 
duties will depend on what we know or believe 
about them. If our circumstances have allowed 
us to believe in God, we shall have very serious 
duties toward him; and our duties toward our 
fellow men will vary in importance according to 
what we know of them. Fortunately, our prin- 
cipal duty toward God coincides with our duty to 
our fellow men, for it must be his wish, implanted 
in our consciences, that we should do them good. 
That is the larger part of our duty to God; and 
the obligation to do it for him adds immense 
emphasis to sense of obligation involved in the 
natural virtue of altruism. The bare stoical ac- 
ceptance of altruism instead of self-love will seem 
frail and cold unless it is stimulated by belief that 
it is the will of God. Religious people ought to 
be, and I think they are, the leaders in all service 
for good order and public welfare. 

-Duties directed immediately toward God alone 
are comparatively few, and, I may say, less es- 
sential. We have done our best for him when 
we have done our best for his creatures. We 
cannot add to his goodness or wisdom or hap- 
piness. All we can do is to tell him that we love 
him and will do his will, and we can also ask 
him to do what we know he will do wisely. He 
has made laws for the conduct of his world, and 
those laws he will not break; but I do not see 



ESSENTIALS AND NON-ESSENTIALS 201 

why he cannot guide their operation, even as 
we can, and as I believe he has done through the 
whole process of the evolution of this and all 
worlds. 

Beyond such prayer and grateful praise I can 
think of no special act of service we can do directly 
for God alone unless it be in certain forms of 
public worship, and even those have their ad- 
vantage in fellowship with others. We can ob- 
serve the Sabbath because we believe he com- 
manded it ; or we can engage in certain ceremonies 
or sacraments as ordained by him, but these are 
all mere forms and ordinances, appointed for their 
value to us and not valuable in themselves. If 
the value fails then the observance vanishes. 
They are but of secondary importance, for the 
one essential worship toward God is to worship 
him in the spirit and in truth. 

When we pass from the realm of conduct and 
duty to that of knowledge and belief, the case is 
not so simple. There are many grades of evi- 
dence leading to more or less assurance of belief, 
and grades of importance of our theological doc- 
trines. In his remarkable " Self -Re view," written 
in his old age, Richard Baxter, after telling how 
his own beliefs had been modified since youth, 
makes the following very instructive gradation 
of certainties: 

My certainty that I am a man, is before my certainty 
that there is a God, for quodfacit notum est magis notum : 



202 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

my certainty that there is a God is greater than my cer- 
tainty that he require th love and holiness of his creature: 
my certainty of this is greater than my certainty of the 
life of reward and punishment hereafter: my certainty 
of that is greater than my certainty of the endless dura- 
tion of it, and of the immortality of individuate souls: 
my certainty of the Deity is greater than my certainty 
of the Christian faith: my certainty of the Christian 
faith, in its essentials, is greater than my certainty of the 
perfection and infallibility of all the Holy Scriptures: 
my certainty of that is greater than my certainty of the 
meaning of many particular texts, and so of the truth of 
many particular doctrines, or of the canonicalness of some 
certain books. So that as you see by what gradations my 
understanding doth proceed, so also my certainty differeth 
as the evidences differ. And they that have attained to 
greater perfection, and a higher degree of certainty than 
I, should pity me and produce their evidence to help me. 

In this quotation it is suggested that there is 
a gradation also of the relative importance of 
various doctrines which have found a place in 
creeds. 

The first by far in importance of all religious 
beliefs is belief in the existence of God; for on 
belief in God all other religious beliefs rest, and, 
what is more important, all religious duties of con- 
duct. While it is of much more importance to be 
good than to believe correctly in God, or to be- 
lieve at all in him, yet a belief in an infinite God 
of boundless goodness and holiness must have the 
effect which the vision had on Isaiah, who replied 
to the call of God and the cry of the world: "Here 
am I; send me." 



ESSENTIALS AND NON-ESSENTIALS 203 

Following Richard Baxter, I recur to some of 
our more or less accepted Christian doctrines 
which depend on our belief in God. Just as our 
belief in God must rest on good, rational evi- 
dence, so all our religious beliefs which depend 
on it must be supported by evidence. Reason 
is always arbiter. For children, and for those 
who are children in faith, fed with milk and not 
with meat, it is enough to take the word of the 
church, but not so for the teachers of the church 
nor for any one else who has learned to think for 
himself and has the opportunity to do it. I take 
it that those who formulated our creeds were 
mere men like us, and did not know as much as 
we do and could not possibly know as much. 
We have more science, more knowledge of his- 
tory and philosophy than they, and can judge 
and criticise on matters of belief better than they. 
I reject and resent the idea that my belief is to 
be dictated to me by anybody or by any church. 
To my own master, God, and to him alone, I 
stand or fall. In matters of morals as well as of 
fact I must stand on my own conscience, no 
matter what the church says, or what the law 
says, or what the Bible says, or what I am told 
anywhere or by anybody that God says. I will 
search and get evidence from all these and from 
every source, but in the end my best decision is 
final and supreme; and so is every man's. 

For illustrations of more or less accepted Chris- 
tian doctrines let us take the authority of the 



2o 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Bible. I take it that the important thing in it 
is its truth, or the true things in it. Some hold 
that it is so fully inspired from God that every- 
thing in it is true. If such were the case it would 
be a great saving of thought. But we know that 
cannot be so, for the world was not made in six 
days, and there was no such universal flood as 
is described, and the multiplicity of languages did 
not originate in Babel, and the second coming of 
our Lord did not occur "in this generation/ ' and 
God did not send "a lying spirit' ' to deceive 
Ahab, and they were not blessed who dashed the 
"little ones against the stones.' ' But there may 
be a degree of divine guidance and inspiration 
which does not wholly swamp a man's idiosyn- 
crasies and ignorance, and it is the truth in the 
Bible that is of enormous value; and what is 
truth and what is error we have to judge for our- 
selves ; and so far as I can judge, no one doctrine 
of inspiration is of much importance, for we al- 
ways have to check its statements by our- own 
study of historical evidence and our ethical sense. 
For the important thing is the real truth, not the 
way God told the truth or allowed the error to 
be mixed with the truth. That is his knowledge 
and not ours; and a stiff doctrine of inspiration 
has driven not a few souls away from the Chris- 
tian faith. 

Believing in God, the belief in his absolute 
goodness and love is of the greatest importance. 






ESSENTIALS AND NON-ESSENTIALS 205 

Jesus taught that God is to be addressed as our 
father rather than as king. His love to us is a 
fathers love. Trusting in his love, other doc- 
trines taught of old and even now are of no serious 
importance, particularly if they do not at all affect 
us or our conduct, but relate to subjects on which 
God only has knowledge. Such is the doctrine 
of the division of the divine nature into three 
persons, each of which is the fulness of God, as 
taught in the Nicene and Athanasian creeds. 
Whether this is true or not, God only knows and 
we know not. We can have no knowledge of it 
except from the Scriptures as believed to con- 
tain a revelation on the subject from God. But 
students of the Bible differ as to what it teaches, 
and various views as to its teaching can honestly 
be held. If we believe in three persons after 
Athanasius, or in three phases after Sabellius, 
or in one undifferentiated God after Arius, makes 
no serious difference, for if we love and serve God 
just the same, God will surely love us, however 
we may have mistaken in a matter that does not 
concern us, but concerns only God. There is a 
creed which sends to hell those that differ from 
its doctrine, but its statement that such will 
without doubt perish everlastingly is an impious 
lie, an insult to God, a denial of his goodness. 

Closely allied to this is the doctrine that Jesus 
while on earth was the second person in the 
Trinity, containing in himself full Godhead, and 



2o6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

this teaching many draw from the Bible. As to 
whether this is a fact, Christians differ, although 
on this, as on the matter of the Trinity, the large 
majority accept it. Whether true or not is a 
question partly of history, partly of psychology, 
and the evidence is wholly found in Scripture, 
and is variously interpreted; and our conclusion 
is affected by the weight we put on a doctrine of 
inspiration. As a matter of history or psychology, 
this question of the nature of Jesus Christ, whether 
fully or only mediately and partially divine, or 
whether he was only an extraordinary human 
teacher of religion, is very interesting, but cannot 
be of supreme importance to us; for whichever 
view we take of it, our duty remains the same, 
and the honest believer, whatever his conclusion, 
must be equally acceptable to a good God. God 
must love goodness wherever it is and whatever 
its intellectual mistakes, and he cannot help 
loving it. It is not necessary for us to know just 
how much divinity was in Jesus. That is God's 
affair rather than ours. 

And this connects itself with the doctrine of 
the Atonement, on which theologians have guessed 
so much and have imposed so much on others. 
The question which the doctrine of the Atone- 
ment presumes to answer is, How does God 
manage to forgive sin ? What satisfaction for 
sin does God require ? Men have differed im- 
mensely on this subject, defending, all of them, 



ESSENTIALS AND NON-ESSENTIALS 207 

their view from the Bible. But only God knows, 
and we have pretty much ceased to discuss this 
question, and we are coming to leave it to God. 
The question is not important, except as it as- 
sumes, to begin with, that some satisfaction is 
necessary. There may be ; there may not be, any 
more than the father in the parable of the Prod- 
igal Son required satisfaction before he should wel- 
come the son with a ring and the fatted calf. 

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is 
one of vital importance, not because our duty to 
be good would be any different if we believed the 
soul not to be immortal, but because disbelief in 
it would lead a multitude of careless souls, per- 
haps most of us, to say with Paul's too hasty 
language: "If the dead are not raised let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die." But yet the 
nature of that future life is something that we 
can know very little or nothing of from any light 
of nature, and the purely figurative language of 
Scripture leaves us with little more than the con- 
clusion which nature gives us, that the God of 
all goodness will do what is just and right. It is 
a remarkable fact, accordingly, that teachers of 
the Christian religion have very nearly ceased to 
preach heaven and hell to the people; and it 
must be because they think the doctrine of future 
rewards and punishments less important and less 
definitely certain than their fathers did. They 
now emphasize other persuasives to a right life. 



2o8 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

The doctrines much discussed years ago of the 
freedom of the will and the divine decrees ap- 
pear to me of little practical importance. They 
divided the Methodists from the Calvinists, and 
now nobody is much interested in them; and yet 
the old division of the denominations continues, 
when the occasion for it has passed. It was thought 
that if God decreed all our acts, then our responsi- 
bility was all gone, and with it virtue and vice; 
but we know better. We see that there was a 
flaw somewhere, and where it was we care little, 
for the conflict is over. As with so many of these 
questions, it is none of our business how God made 
his plans or what he planned. That is all God's 
business. Our business is to be good like God. 

There was an old doctrine of congenital total 
depravity, of inherited sin that came down to us 
by human nature corrupted in Adam. I don't 
hear it much preached now, but it is yet in ven- 
erated creeds. One reason for its disappearance 
is because we have ceased to believe that there 
was such a man as Adam, or if there was, that we 
could possibly have sinned in him. And we find 
it impossible to believe in total depravity from 
birth, resulting from a nature corrupted by one 
disobedience of Adam. At any rate, the series 
of doctrines related thereto appears to me to be, 
for the Christian life, of little practical importance. 
We know that we are free, and we know the ob- 
ligations of right and the criminality of wrong; 



ESSENTIALS AND NON-ESSENTIALS 209 

and that is important. We do not need any more 
to argue, as Doctor Emmons did, that sin consists 
in sinning. Of course it does, and in nothing 
else. 

When I say that in my thinking I distinguish 
essentials from non-essentials, in belief as well as 
in duty, and that only duty is supremely essen- 
tial, I do not mean to say that these less essential, 
less important beliefs or questions are not worth 
serious thought, whether mine or others'. Any- 
thing as serious as religion is worth serious thought. 
To one who sees in the Bible much more of revela- 
tion and much less of evolution than I do, it will 
seem of much more importance than to me to 
study the last hidden meaning there is in that 
revelation, and the last just deductions from it. 
Such a one will be much more concerned than am 
I to understand the mystery of the Trinity which 
he draws out of its language, or the wonder of the 
Atonement, or the divinity of Christ, on which 
the Atonement rests. Equally one who holds that 
the voice of the church in its councils and creeds 
is as binding as inspiration on our beliefs, will 
regard as very important dogmas which I hold 
to be of little value or none at all, or even as un- 
true. Yet even so, as Richard Baxter teaches 
us, the belief in the council, or the church, or 
the inspiration is of a nature higher than the 
belief in its pronouncements, and it is best for 
them, and for me, to consider very carefully the 



2io WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

arguments on which that higher belief rests. 
Especially the doctrine of inspiration, which in 
its stricter form binds us to believe as true and 
right, on the authority of God, whatever we find 
in our Scriptures, requires at this day renewed 
and impartial study. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 

I MIGHT, perhaps, after a study of the evi- 
dence of theism, and a statement far too 
brief of the basis and rule of duty, here end 
rjiy discussion of belief and the reasons of belief, 
for all that is absolutely essential in religion and 
morals has now been reached if not covered. 
For it is incredible that a good God would not 
look with favor on a good man, who tried to live 
a life of good- will to his fellow men and of honor 
toward God; for "what doth the Lord thy God 
require of thee " beyond this? For we may be 
sure that the abundant good- will of God will be 
toward such a candid soul, even if he knew no 
more and believed no more than this. But some 
further discussion is needed, both because much 
more is believed and often demanded, and also 
because further religious faith has been of great 
service in keeping men in the path of duty. 

Passing, then, to the subject of Scripture, I 
observe that the adherents of a number of reli- 
gions have books, or a collection of books, which 
they regard as sacred and authoritative. Chief 
among these religions are Hinduism, with its 



2i2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Vedas; Buddhism, with its Tripitaka, or Three- 
fold Path; Zoroastrianism, with the Avesta; 
Hebraism, with the Old Testament ; Christianity, 
which adds the New Testament, while retaining 
the Jewish Scriptures; and Mohammedanism, 
with the Koran; the old Egyptian Book of the 
Dead, and a long series of Babylonian hymns, 
and a multitude of other holy books, that have 
originated, some of them, as late even as our 
own day, of which our own country has produced 
its full share, such as the Scriptures of Mor- 
monism and Christian Science, while Persia has 
within a century given us the holy books of the 
Babists. Because the religion in which I have 
been educated and to which I have adhered is 
Christianity, I am obliged with great concise- 
ness to give some reasons why its Sacred Books 
are superior to any others, and what is the nature 
of the authority on which they rest. 

I can immediately dismiss the religion of the 
Vedas, for it is polytheistic. That excludes it 
from comparison; it is plainly untrue and un- 
worthy. 

Buddhism comes next. That also must be 
dismissed for a different reason. The central 
aim which it presents to its adherents is that 
they rid themselves of desire and ambition and 
feeling and hope, since all existence is bad, and 
the ultimate goal is absorption of being in the 
universal infinite; and this is to be achieved by 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 213 

a series of incarnations of successive lives of 
renunciation of pleasures. It appears to me to be 
a hopeless and hateful religion which offers no 
sort of evidence for its incarnations. 

Zoroastrianism is a great advance on either of 
the two religions of India. It is so impressed with 
the conflict of good and evil in the world that it 
concludes there must be two mighty spirits, each 
supreme in his sphere, the utterly good Ahura 
Mazda, and the utterly bad Ahriman. These 
two are independent in their being, and so not 
infinite either in power or wisdom, for neither 
can destroy the other, at least during the present 
dispensation. Ahura Mazda created the world 
and all things in it good; he also created good 
spirits to rule the universe, what we would call 
angels and archangels. But whatever he created 
that was good was offset by corresponding evil 
creations by Ahriman, evil spirits, storms, dis- 
eases, wars, etc. Fire was the emblem of the 
good god, and sacrifices were offered to him. 
Much was made of purity of life, but of this, 
ritual purity was a great part — even the earth 
must be freed from defilement. There is a judg- 
ment after death, and also a final judgment, after 
which those who have been in hell will endure 
a limited further punishment, until all things will 
be restored by the deliverance of a Saviour. Then 
Ahura Mazda will destroy Ahriman, the good 
spirits will each destroy his evil counterpart, the 



2i 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

icy mountains will be levelled to fertile plains, and 
a new dispensation of righteousness will reign on 
the earth. There is much in this like Judaism 
and Christianity, but the dualistic element in it, 
although the power of Ahriman is finally over- 
come, together with its excessive ritualism, makes 
it, noble religion though it is, far inferior to Juda- 
ism or Christianity. Unfortunately we do not 
possess the original Zoroastrian writings, only texts 
of perhaps eight centuries after Christ, and we do 
not certainly know whether in the case of ele- 
ments common to both, the Jewish religion bor- 
rowed from the Persian or the reverse. 

The Jewish religion knows only one supreme 
God, creator of all things and of all beings. He 
is the infinitely wise and good God. This is its 
great excellence, and it accordingly insists on 
justice and righteousness. It had in early times a 
full ritual of sacrifices, but its ritualism mainly 
ended with the destruction of the Temple. It 
has in its Scriptures no clear doctrine of a future 
life of reward or punishment, but there are intima- 
tions of it in its later sacred books, and its Apocry- 
phal books are familiar with heaven and hell and 
with the activities of angels and devils. Present- 
day Judaism emphasizes the existence of God and 
the bearings of duty on this world, but pays little 
attention to the next. It retains the Mosaic 
legislation, with the observance of the seventh 
day and the feast days, but omits the sacrifices. 



THE HEBREW wSCRIPTURES 215 

While at present circumcision is universally re- 
tained as a distinctive rite, the more advanced 
keep nothing else except it be theism, and their 
religion is little more than ethical culture added 
to racial nationalism. In its stricter usage I can- 
not accept any of its ritualism as belonging to a 
pure religion, and in its more radical form it is 
scarcely a religion. Even so it is a racial religion, 
based on a rite. 

Mohammedanism is, like Judaism, purely mono- 
theistic, and is the religion proclaimed by a single 
teacher, Mohammed, who got his ideas from a 
very imperfect apprehension of Judaism and 
Christianity, with influences from the neigh- 
boring paganism. It is a religion of force, con- 
quering by the sword, and it favors polygamy. 
Its notions of the future life are gross, and have 
borrowed much from Zoroastrianism as to heaven 
and hell and the judgment of the dead. It can 
be dismissed as inferibr to Christianity, although 
relieved of nearly all Hebraic ritualism. Of all 
the world religions Christianity in its various 
forms, or at least in its purest forms and in the 
character of its Sacred Books is easily the best. 
It holds to the personal and supreme God of 
Judaism; it requires only the simplest ritual ob- 
servances; it magnifies justice and holiness, but 
it magnifies more the love of God as Father of 
his children the world over, the supremacy of 
love over justice; and as Lord and Master it 



216 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

presents Jesus Christ who revealed God to the 
world; and it promises heaven to the good and 
threatens hell to the wicked. It expects the 
reign of righteousness on earth and a final judg- 
ment. It has its various schools of thought which 
emphasize or discredit various more or less dis- 
tinctive doctrines, so that it is not possible to 
give a common creed; for what some would hold 
to be absolutely essential, others who equally 
claim and are allowed the name of Christian 
would deny. 

Christianity accepts the thirty-nine Sacred 
Books of Judaism and adds to them the twenty- 
seven books of the New Testament. As I see no 
reason to accept the sacred books of other reli- 
gions as having any binding authority on me, it 
will be requisite to consider only what I must 
believe as to the authority of these Jewish and 
Christian Scriptures. 

There has come down to us by tradition and 
education a general belief in the Scriptures of the 
Old and New Testaments as having been given 
to us by revelation from God, or, at least, by 
writers inspired from God to give us true in- 
struction as to religious history and duty. As 
to the degree and nature of that inspiration Chris- 
tians differ. The value of a doctrine of inspira- 
tion is to assure to us the truth, and so the au- 
thority of the books inspired. The truth is the 
important thing, and the inspiration is supposed 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 217 

to put the seal upon the truth and forbid doubt. 
It is the truth in them that is of value. 

The question now to be considered is that of 
the actual inspiration of Scripture, or of its nature 
and extent. The old view was that these books 
were so fully inspired by the Holy Ghost that 
absolutely no error of any sort is to be found in 
them. Few intelligent people, at least among 
Protestants, still adhere to this inherited view, 
while all Catholics are obliged to hold the strict 
doctrine of the church on this subject. We have 
full right to judge of the inspiration of our Scrip- 
tures, and no church has the right to impose its 
decision upon us. I claim that right to myself. 
The church is made up of men, and I am a man 
with the rest of the members, and with equal 
right to judge. What I must judge is as to the 
truth of the statements made in the books, and the 
moral quality of their contents, whether worthy 
of God. On both of these points I have the right 
to judge and cannot help judging as soon as I 
begin to raise the question of inspiration. 

And first, as to the Jewish Scriptures, what do 
they claim for themselves as to their inspiration ? 
I take the thirty-nine books in order, not the 
order of the old Greek translation which our 
English translations follow, and even unfor- 
tunately the Revised Version, but that which 
has come down to us in the Hebrew text. By 
not following it the English reader misses the 



2i8 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

fact that the Old Testament is divided into three 
collections, of which the Law was the first to be 
received as canonical, followed later by the 
Prophets, and later still by the Psalms, or Hagi- 
ographa. 

Of these three the Law embraces what are called 
the Five Books of Moses. The book of Genesis 
makes no claim to have any authority different 
from any other book of history, and the same is 
true of the four succeeding books. We are not 
told who wrote them, and the anonymous author 
(or authors) makes no claim to special inspira- 
tion requiring belief. We are left to judge from 
their contents whether they are true, or how far 
they are true. We are told, to be sure, that a 
considerable part of the contents of Exodus, 
Leviticus, and Numbers was repeated by God to 
Moses on Mount Sinai, such as the Ten Com- 
mandments; and many a chapter begins with 
the words, "And the Lord spake unto Moses, 
saying/ ' For the contents of these chapters the 
writer claims not mere inspiration but absolute 
revelation from God who is said to have spoken 
to Moses face to face. But by whom the writer 
was told this, or from whom he quoted these 
many passages, or whether the writer, living then 
or some centuries later, himself composed them, 
we are not told. We must judge of them simply 
from their contents, unless we are willing to rest 
on the authority of the church or of tradition; 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 219 

but that would be renouncing reason. We would 
not do that in the case of any other books. 

Included in the collection called "Prophets" 
are Joshua, Judges, the two Books of Samuel, 
and the two of Kings, followed by Isaiah, Jere- 
miah, Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets. 
Of these the purely historical books, Joshua, 
Judges, Samuel, and Kings are not attested as in 
any way differing from other books of the class, 
and I can see no reason why they should not be 
subjected to the usual canons of criticism. 

Next come the three Major and the twelve 
Minor Prophets. Of the latter Jonah forms an 
exception, as it is not properly a prophecy but 
on the face of it a religious romance, and it bears 
no attestation, not even the name of its author. 
It is perfectly clear that the superscription to 
Isaiah in the first verse cannot cover the entire 
book, for the Isaiah there credited with the proph- 
ecies lived before the Captivity, while the author 
of the later chapters lived after the Captivity. 
A promise of return from the Captivity appears 
in 43 : 5-6 and 60 ! 20. A date is set in 44 : 28 
and 45 : 11, where Cyrus is spoken of as then 
reigning, and about to permit the rebuilding of 
Jerusalem. In 48 : 20-21 the Jews are bidden to 
escape from Babylon: "Go ye forth from Baby- 
lon; flee ye from the Chaldeans.' ' They "were 
sold for nought," they "shall be redeemed with- 
out money.' ' In 64 : 10 Jerusalem is said to be a 



22o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

desolation and the temple burned with fire. This 
was not true in the days of Isaiah. The book 
is thus a compilation, part of it written pre- 
sumably by Isaiah, and the more valuable por- 
tion anonymous. Large portions of the book, 
whether from Isaiah or the later writer, are put 
in the mouth of God as his declarations; whether 
truly and historically his words or so attributed 
to him dramatically, we are to judge. It is evi- 
dent that here we have come into a new field of 
literary activity, that of the prophetic function, 
which needs consideration. Jeremiah is a book 
of oracles, "The word of the Lord came unto me/' 
or, "The word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah," 
or "Thus saith the Lord." The conditions are 
the same in Ezekiel, with a richer development 
of visions. 

When we come to the Minor Prophets, omit- 
ting Jonah, the conditions are still much the 
same. They are all declarations of the divine 
will, of hope or doom, interspersed with visions. 
The third chapter of Habakkuk is a late psalm, 
by way of exception, which has been attached to 
the oracles. 

The third division of the Hebrew Scriptures, 
the last to be incorporated into the Jewish canon, 
is the Hagiographa, and consists of the Psalms, 
Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamenta- 
tions, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehe- 
miah, and First and Second Chronicles. Of these 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 221 

not one makes any claim for special inspiration 
except the latter half of Daniel. The first half is 
a collection of religious stories followed by a dream 
and visions granted to Daniel, a Jew of whom we 
have no historical knowledge beyond this book 
itself. As it is now generally admitted even by 
conservative scholars that the Book of Daniel was 
not written before the time of Antiochus Epiph- 
anes, that is, three centuries after the times of the 
Daniel described in this book, and as it was a 
common convention at this period to put one's 
teachings into the mouth of some old authority, 
just as Plato and Cicero did in Greece and Rome, 
the ascription of the book to Daniel as a prophet 
falls away; and indeed the authors of the Jewish 
canon did not count him a prophet, nor did they 
put this book with those of the prophets, but into 
the latest collection. The earlier chapters appear 
to be, like Ruth and Esther, which also belong 
to the Hagiographa, edifying patriotic or religious 
stories rather than to be accepted as histories; 
while the last chapters of Daniel belong to a large 
class of eschatological books anticipating the com- 
ing reign of righteousness in which the writers 
of the class delighted, and of which Daniel is the 
best, and the only one to be received into the 
final Jewish canon. 

Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles are purely his- 
torical and make no special claim to authority 
beyond their internal evidence. The Book of 



222 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Psalms is made up of five separate books, probably 
of different dates of collection, and were used for 
worship in the Second Temple. Some are credited 
to their supposed authors or to collections, and 
others are anonymous. None of them make any 
more claim to superior inspiration than do the 
hymns of the Wesleys. Equally Proverbs is made 
up of various collections of wise and popular say- 
ings, and, so far as their text goes, are to be 
judged by their intrinsic value. The next book 
is Job, a drama enclosed in a story. It is anony- 
mous, religious, doubtfully of Hebrew origin, and 
makes no claim to be treated with any more 
reverence than its contents require. It is a noble 
work, the story in prose and the dialogue in poetry. 
The Song of Songs is composed of nuptial songs, 
is in no sense religious, and can be made religious 
only by such arbitrary interpretation as is to be 
seen in the titles of the chapters in King James's 
Version. Lamentations is a series of acrostic 
poems bewailing Jerusalem, the verses beginning 
with the successive letters of the alphabet, and 
it shows no reason why it should not be judged 
like other such poetry. Ecclesiastes is a late book 
the writer of which has put his philosophy into 
the mouth of Solomon, as the writer of Daniel 
put his apocalypses into the mouth of Daniel. 
No inspiration is claimed for it. 

We thus find that the Old Testament, the Bible 
of the Jews, claims revelation from God for the 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 223 

larger parts of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, 
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and eleven Minor 
Prophets, while no claim is made for the writers 
of the other books which make up the three 
Jewish collections of writings selected by the 
rabbis of two centuries before and nearly a cen- 
tury after the birth of Christ from their general 
literature to be held as sacred. This requires me 
briefly to consider the validity of the claims of 
those writers who speak as the mouthpieces of 
God. 

It is as nearly certain as any fact relating to 
so ancient a period can be, that the so-called Five 
Books of Moses were not written by Moses. It 
is nowhere claimed in these books that he wrote 
them and they tell us that after him there arose 
no prophet like him, and the story is told of his 
death. Of course, writing was well known at the 
age of Moses, but in the Egyptian or Babylonian, 
not in the Hebrew letters or language. No such 
fragment of that age has been found. Of course, 
we can imagine the books written in Egyptian 
or Babylonian and translated into Hebrew five 
hundred years later, but that is very improbable. 
The consensus of scholarship is that they were 
composed centuries after the death of Moses, and 
that the author made such use of materials as he 
could and by a perfectly legitimate literary con- 
vention of his day put into the mouth of Moses 
or of Balaam and into the mouth of the Lord 



224 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the teachings which he believed to represent the 
religious history of Israel and the worship of 
Jehovah. In a way both historical and dramatic 
he has done what Milton did when in a more ven- 
turesome way he enters the council-chamber of 
Jehovah, and in the third book of "Paradise Lost" 
reports the long dialogue between the Father and 
the Son. These Five Books of Moses are of im- 
mense value for history and religion, but I cannot 
see that they carry evidence of possessing the 
binding authority of inspiration. 

The case with the prophetical books is quite 
different from that with the Pentateuch. Here 
we have the definite claim of inspiration from the 
writers themselves. Prophets were numerous in 
those days, old prophets, young prophets, schools 
of the prophets in training as under Elisha, wan- 
dering dervish prophets, as in the day of Saul; 
and there were rival prophets who prophesied 
against each other, each, for aught we can see, 
impressed with the truth of his message, declaring 
it had been given him from Jehovah. An in- 
structive story we have in the twenty-seventh 
and twenty-eighth chapters of Jeremiah. 

Jeremiah advocated political submission to 
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, who had made 
a raid on Jerusalem and carried away captives 
and holy vessels from the temple. His advice 
was politic, but did not seem patriotic. He 
claimed an oracle from the Lord, but there were 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 225 

other prophets who also claimed to speak the 
word of the Lord, and who assured King Zede- 
kiah of speedy deliverance and the return of the 
sacred vessels. To impress his wiser counsel Jere- 
miah put a wooden yoke about his neck, and 
went to the king and his princes and told them, 
from the Lord, that they must submit to the 
yoke of Nebuchadnezzar if they wished peace. 
But the prophet Hananiah entered the temple and 
proclaimed : 

Thus said Jehovah of Hosts, the God of Israel, I have 
broke the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years 
I will restore to this place all the vessels of the house of 
Jehovah which Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, took 
from this place and carried to Babylon; and Jechoniah, 
son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and all the captivity of 
Judah that went to Babylon I will bring back to this 
place said Jehovah, for I will break the yoke of the king 
of Babylon. 

Jeremiah listened and only said he wished it 
might be so, but that the event would prove 
which had spoken truth. Then Hananiah took 
the yoke off from Jeremiah's neck and said: 
"Thus saith Jehovah, So will I break the yoke 
of Nebuchadnezzar off the necks of all these na- 
tions within the space of two years." Jeremiah 
was silent for a day or two, and then returned 
with a message from Jehovah declaring that in- 
stead of a yoke of wood a yoke of iron should be 



226 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

put on the necks of these nations, and that Hana- 
niah should die within a year. 

Apparently prophet was a general term, profes- 
sionally allowed to any one who claimed it, and 
Jeremiah and Hananiah were equally known as 
prophets of Jehovah; and it would seem they 
equally believed they were speaking the will of 
God. The prophetic function was not peculiar to 
Palestine, for all the nations around had the same 
office under different names, given to diviners and 
interpreters of dreams and ministers of oracles. 
Even Cicero was an augur. 

I cannot doubt that the select line of prophets 
received into the Jewish canon were the great 
moral and religious teachers of ancient Israel. 
They were infused with the sense of right and duty, 
and with a true patriotism which was held sub- 
ordinate to their passionate loyalty to Israel's 
God. Their supreme religious fervor bore them 
much further than is expressed in the noble lines 
of John Quincy Adams : 

" And say not thou, My country right or wrong, 
Nor shed thy blood in an unhallowed cause . . . 
But when thy country tramples on the right 
Furl up her banner and avert thy sight"; 

for they never wearied to beseech the people to 
return to their God, and they denounced his sure 
judgments on refusal to obey their warnings. 
I take it that a prophet was one who claimed 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 227 

to announce the will of God to the king, the 
priests, and the people. He was, with scarce an 
exception, a man of special education, of broad 
knowledge of affairs, with the attitude of a states- 
man competent to instruct the court. More than 
this, he was an enthusiast, and he believed that 
what he said was the will of God. The prophets 
had the genius of poets, whether they wrote in 
prose or verse. It is to be observed that if they 
delivered their " burdens' ' and oracles orally, 
they also wrote them down at their leisure, in 
such a literary style and with such passion that 
their writings were copied and preserved. They 
were prophets not because they foretold things, 
but because they proclaimed things on the au- 
thority of God Almighty; and their prophecies 
were all of judgments on Israel if she did not 
repent, and of the visitations of God's wrath on 
the nations that had oppressed Israel. 

I cannot doubt that these prophets believed 
that they were speaking the will of God; but not 
that they believed they were repeating God's 
words dictated to them. Yet they believed it in 
a higher sense than that in which some earnest 
and passionate preacher, some Savonarola or 
Luther, now proclaims and foretells; some Ben- 
jamin Franklin, who says: "We must all hang 
together, or we shall assuredly all hang sepa- 
rately"; or some Lincoln, who trembles when 
he remembers that God is just. They were 



228 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

enthusiasts. They lived in an age when God 
seemed very near to man, when many a man saw 
visions and felt, or thought he felt, the very im- 
pulse of God in his soul. To them a strong con- 
viction or a strong passion was the voice of God; 
and why may it not have been, and why may it 
not be now his voice when we feel the call of 
duty ? They were human ; they could err. They 
could speak only up to their conviction or their 
knowledge, some better inspired, some less so: 

" For every fiery prophet of old times, 
And all the sacred madness of the bard, 
When God made music through them, could but speak 
His music by the framework and the cord"; 

and as they felt it they have spoken truth. 

This does not exclude literary conventions, of 
the prophets' own composition, given as illustra- 
tions, parables, visions, put into the mouth of 
God. There is a multitude of threats of ven- 
geance on other nations that we cannot approve, 
although put into the mouth of Jehovah, as 
venomous as those in the imprecatory psalms, 
of which Isaac Watts says in his notes on his 
metrical versions: "I have omitted the dreadful 
imprecations on his enemies " (Psalm 69); and 
"Rejoicing in the destruction of our personal 
enemies is not so evangelical a practise ; therefore 
I have given the eleventh verse of this psalm an- 
other turn ,, (Psalm 92); and Psalm 137 he passes 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 229 

by entirely, with other passages as not "so well 
suited to the spirit of the Gospel/ ' No one can 
believe that God inspired the sadly human im- 
precation: "Happy shall he be that taketh and 
dasheth thy little ones against the stones"; and 
there are many whole chapters of such curses in 
the prophets which cannot be read with edifica- 
tion because they are unchristian, and which I 
would never wish to translate for the instruction 
of Buddhists or Confucianists. I do not find the 
imprecations on Moab and Ammon in Jeremiah, 
or those on the surrounding nations in the two 
first chapters of Amos, helpful to devotion when 
read in either public or family worship; and I 
believe these "fiery prophets of old time, ,, made 
their faulty music by the rude "framework and 
the cord," and not by the touch of the finger and 
the loving heart of the All-Father. They were 
inspired in a measure, but I cannot see that it 
was by any such compelling influence as saved 
them from error, whether historical, scientific, 
ethical, or religious. Always our best reason and 
best sense of right, that which we have learned 
from a higher teacher since the days of those 
Hebrew prophets, must judge them, but most 
reverently, most gratefully, as having been the 
highest teachers the world had known, through 
whom the knowledge of the one true God has 
come down to us; and yet they, without us, 
could not be made perfect. Too often they looked 



2 3 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

on Jehovah as the special Hebrew God, even as 
Naomi bade her daughters-in-law go back to 
serve the god of Moab. While a late evangelical 
prophet could anticipate the time when all the 
world should worship Israel's God, yet not in 
the whole Jewish Scriptures is there to be found 
a single command to seek the conversion of for- 
eign nations. 

The present is not a treatise on inspiration. I 
am merely trying in the most succinct way to 
tell what I believe and why I believe it. And I 
do not find in the Old Testament itself any evi- 
dence of any such inspiration as forbids us to 
judge it, and to accept or decline its teachings 
on any subject. Most of it claims no such in- 
spiration. We would never imagine it authorita- 
tively inspired if we had not inherited the belief, 
first from the Jews of a century or two before 
Christ, and then from the writers of the New 
Testament. The three books of the Pentateuch 
which tell us what God said to Moses are books 
of history, and we must judge of them by the 
same canons as we judge of the speeches given 
us by Thucydides as spoken by other leaders. 
For myself, I believe that these books were 
written long after the time of Moses and that 
they are not literally historical. The prophetic 
books are splendid works of inspiration, but not 
of such inspiration as the previous Christian gen- 
erations have held them to be. The writers be- 



THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES 231 

lieved themselves to be speaking the will of God, 
and they wrote and spoke with authority. They 
promised good for the good and threatened evil 
for the evil, and also for the enemies of their na- 
tion. They spoke the highest utterance of their 
times, not of all times. Their teachings were not 
perfect, but they came as near perfection as 
human faculties and human conscience and faith 
could then attain. Their writings deserve to 
have been the Bible of the Hebrew people, but 
there was something better to follow. 



CHAPTER XIX 
THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 

WHEN the twenty-seven books of the 
Christian Scriptures were written there 
was no question among the Jews that 
the thirty-nine books of the Jewish Scriptures 
were fully, and, we may say, verbally, inspired. 
The writers of the Christian Scriptures were all 
Jews, and they accepted unquestioningly this 
belief. In Gal. 3 : 16 Paul bases an argument 
on the use of the singular, "seed," instead of 
the plural, "seeds," depending with rabbinic 
nicety on the verbal exactness of the text, which 
gives the promise to Abraham. The writers of 
the New Testament based their claims for the 
new faith on their exegesis of the commonly ac- 
cepted Hebrew Scriptures which bore full divine 
authority, and they tried thus to show that Jesus 
was the promised Messiah. But no such inspira- 
tion do they claim for their own writings, simply 
the authority of truth. That satisfied the Apos- 
tolic Church. 

The three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, 
and Luke, are books of biography. They are the 
remains of a number of such books recording the 

232 



THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 233 

sayings and works of Jesus, and they were pre- 
served no doubt because they were the most 
complete and valuable of all that were current. 
Luke tells us in the first verse of his Gospel that 
many such booklets were current in the churches, 
but all of them have perished except these three 
Gospels. One of them, indeed more than one, 
Luke certainly used, for much of his material is 
common to Matthew and Mark. Matthew's 
Gospel is also composite, and Mark's seems to be 
the most nearly original of the three. The writers 
make no claims to have possessed in the writing 
of them anything more than human wisdom. 
For all they have to say we have the right to use 
our judgment in accepting their statements as 
true. But that their object is to give substan- 
tially a true story of the life and teachings and 
death of Jesus is plainly evident. 

This is not so clear as to the Gospel given to 
us under the name of John. No author's name is 
assigned to the Fourth Gospel, any more than to 
those of Matthew and Mark, but an old tradi- 
tion assigns it to the Apostle John; and the last 
chapter, which is an appendix apparently by an- 
other writer, assigns it to him. It may be that 
John wrote it in his old age, or, quite as likely, 
one of John's younger disciples composed it, in- 
corporating facts and reminiscences which he had 
received from his master. 

The latter conjecture seems more probable to 



234 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

me, for it seems evident that it was the intention 
of the writer to give, as in the words of Jesus, the 
substance of the Christian teaching, and not to 
gather up from tradition or memory our Lord's 
actual and exact addresses and prayers. The 
book is dramatic rather than biographic. Thus 
in John 7 : 4-26 is given the prolonged conversa- 
tion of Jesus with the woman of Samaria, when 
no one of the disciples was present. Similarly 
we have in the third chapter the conversation of 
Jesus with Nicodemus at a secret meeting, the 
writer's purpose being in both cases to present 
Jesus as the Christ. It was his plan to put in an 
historical setting the author's idea of the essen- 
tial principles of the Christian faith as they had 
been developed in the church at the time of his 
writing. Whether John wrote it in his old age, 
or John the Presbyter, as some have thought, or 
some other writer, is to me of no importance, not 
worth discussing here, and may be left to the 
schools for study or conjecture. It is enough to 
say that the Fourth Gospel bears to the Synoptic 
Gospels very much the same relation as do the 
Dialogues of Plato, in which the teaching is put 
into the mouth of Socrates, to the actual sayings 
of Socrates as recorded by Xenophon in his 
" Memorabilia.' ' 

It must not be thought that such a composi- 
tion with language put into the mouth of an 
honored leader would be regarded in those days 






THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 235 

as ethically wrong or was meant to deceive. We 
know that sixty books were written by the dis- 
ciples of Pythagoras and ascribed to him with 
the thought of honoring him; and a multitude 
of Jewish books, like the Book of Daniel and the 
Book of Enoch, and a larger number of Christian 
Gospels and other writings ascribed to the Apostles 
have come down to us, and the Christian fathers 
were honored in the same way. When a Greek 
or Latin historian puts into the mouth of a gen- 
eral a rousing address to his soldiers before going 
into battle, it must not be supposed that the his- 
torian had before him a parchment copy of the 
speech, or, indeed, that any speech was made. 
It is simply the historian's way of indicating what 
he believed to be the purpose of the general in 
joining battle. Yet a subsequent writer, or an 
uncritical reader, may make the mistake of sup- 
posing that the author's literary device really 
represented the genuine words of the hero of the 
history. Such has been the case with the Fourth 
Gospel. After its great value made it read in the 
churches and received into the canon, it came to 
be believed — and the tradition has come down 
to us — that the very words of Jesus in his dis- 
courses and their historical setting were truly and 
miraculously reported and have been preserved 
to us. For any such conclusion there is no evi- 
dence and no claim in the Gospel itself. 

It is incredible to me that these discourses at- 



2 3 6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

tributed to Jesus were really uttered by him. 
They are quite unlike the simple, concrete say- 
ings of Jesus given in the three other Gospels, 
and which were written down long before the 
composition of the Fourth Gospel. It is not 
simply the historical discrepancies which affect 
my conclusion, but the substance of the dis- 
courses, which represent a later stage in the 
development of Christianity. The tone is utterly 
different. The three Gospels tell a plain story. 
Jesus does miracles of healing, and gives religious 
teaching about the Father, and righteousness and 
mercy, but publicly makes no claims to be the 
Messiah. That comes but seldom, and then 
privately with his disciples, and he bids them 
tell no man. Even the marvellous judgment 
scene of the last day when he shall sit on the 
throne of his glory, and that other assurance 
that his disciples shall sit on twelve thrones, are 
in private. But it is different in John's Gospel. 
The writer says in his conclusion, before the 
Appendix, that he wrote it "that ye may believe 
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that 
believing ye may have life in his name." Ac- 
cordingly every incident and address is chosen 
and told so as to emphasize publicly as well as 
privately his claim to the Messiahship. He tells 
Nicodemus that he is "the only begotten Son 
of God." He tells the woman of Samaria that 
he is the Christ, and she tells the Samaritans, 



THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 237 

many of whom believe, after he had been with 
them two days, that he was " indeed the Saviour 
of the world.' ' After the cure on the Sabbath at 
the Pool of Bethesda he tells the Jews that he is, 
"the Son of God" and that the dead shall hear 
his voice and come out of the tombs unto the 
resurrection of judgment. Again in the synagogue 
at Capernaum he told the people that his flesh 
was for the life of the world, and that he would 
at the last day raise up those that believed in 
him. And so it goes through the whole Gospel: 
Jesus is all the time talking about himself and 
emphasizing his claims, except in the unauthentic 
account of the woman taken in adultery, which 
sounds like one of the gracious stories lost out 
of the Gospel of Luke. There are no characteristic 
parables, only long addresses. 

The explanation of the difference in the de- 
scription of Jesus given in the Synoptic Gospels 
and that of John is to be found in the fact that 
it represents a later stage in the development of 
the church, and that it was written to emphasize 
that faith in Jesus as Christ and Saviour which 
he taught privately in the chamber and not on 
the housetop. When it was written the church 
had felt the transforming influence of Paul, of 
which we find no trace in the three Gospels, but 
of which the Fourth Gospel is full. I think of 
Paul as brought, as suddenly as by a miracle, to 
the conviction that Jesus was the promised Mes- 



238 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

siah. But that contradicted all the Biblical teach- 
ing he had received, and the permanent authority, 
he saw, though the other Apostles did not im- 
mediately see it, of the Mosaic Law. So he 
searched the Scriptures to learn where his error 
had lain. He clearly saw that the acceptance of 
Jesus as Messiah and King involved a purely 
spiritual religion, with the passing away of the 
Mosaic ritual and ordinances, and the victory of 
Jesus over Moses. How could this be ? He found 
the key to the problem in two passages, one in 
Genesis, that "Abraham believed God and it was 
counted to him for righteousness " that is, for justi- 
fication; the other in Habakkuk, where he found 
the same two words, that "the just shall live by 
his faith," that is, belief. The two passages agree, 
as two witnesses, that one is justified by his belief 
in God, and if so not by any formal rites. The 
first passage shows that a good man, yet uncir- 
cumcised, living centuries before the Mosaic Law, 
could be saved by his faith in God; and the 
second showed that faith was equally efficacious 
after the promulgation of that law. So he found 
Bible authority for discarding the saving value of 
the law of ritual service. Thus faith was to him 
the condition of salvation ; and by faith he meant 
not intellectual belief in a system of doctrine, but 
the opposite of what he called the works of the 
law, of sacrifices, fastings, circumcision, and other 
"bodily exercises' ' which "profit nothing.' ■ That 



THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 239 

is, faith was heart religion, was the acceptance 
of God as the loving Father, obedience to him 
and fellowship with Jesus Christ who had died 
and risen again as the Messiah. 

Thus faith, with Paul, meant faith in Jesus as 
the Christ. But this is what we do not find in 
the Synoptic Gospels as the meaning of faith and 
believe (the same words in Greek). In these Gos- 
pels those who would be healed must " believe' ' 
that he can cure them; if the disciples "believe" 
they can remove mountains they can do it; and 
Jesus bids the multitude "believe" in his good 
news. But in John's Gospel the word believe ap- 
pears more than twice as many times as in the 
three other Gospels together; and now it is to 
believe on Jesus, an expression belonging to Paul 
and not found in the Synoptics. 

Thus the purpose given for writing the Fourth 
Gospel, that its readers might believe that Jesus 
is the Christ, is borne out in its composition. It 
is the latest of the Gospels to be received into 
the canon, while a number of others were written, 
had some currency, but were finally rejected. It 
is rich in spiritual inspiration, a precious treasure, 
but it makes no claims for itself to be received as 
a book inspired in any peculiar way. The speeches 
put into the mouth of our Lord give the spirit of 
his Gospel, but cannot be real reports. 

The Book of Acts is a book of church history, 
but it makes no claim to be judged in any way 



2 4 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

differently from any other book of history; and, 
on the face of it, it is to be valued by what it is 
found to be worth, and that value is immense. 

Paul in his Epistles speaks with a real author- 
ity, but it is the authority of an Apostle rather 
than of one guided in all he may write by the 
Holy Spirit of God. In most of his Epistles he 
describes himself as an Apostle, yet not com- 
missioned like the other Apostles who had been 
disciples of the Lord, for he had never seen Jesus 
in the flesh, but only in a vision ; yet his apostle- 
ship, he claimed, was as direct as theirs and had 
been more fruitful. So far as we can see, the 
very permanence of the Christian Church, as 
well as the definition of its faith, depended on 
Paul. But for his clear exposition of its meaning 
and its universality it might have perished as a 
mere Jewish sect, like that of the Ebionites. 
Paul had the clear vision to see what was in- 
volved in the spirituality of Christ's teachings, 
that in Christ the Gentile is as good as the Jew, 
and that not one ritual observance, not even the 
Sabbath, was retained as of obligation. Jesus, 
as his teachings appear in the Synoptic Gospels, 
never broke the Mosaic Law. He observed its 
commands. He said that he who should break 
one of them would be least in the kingdom of 
heaven; that tithes of mint, anise, and cummin 
should be paid. He kept the Sabbath, but he 
condemned, out of the Law, the stringency which 



THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 241 

forbade to do good on the Sabbath, and the 
hypocrisy which kept the letter but not the 
spirit, and added burdensome traditions and in- 
terpretations; and he strengthened the Law, not 
by adding to its letter but by emphasizing its 
spirit. He preached only to his own people, the 
lost sheep of Israel; but it is the Gospel of John 
which, following Paul, tells us that neither in 
the Samaritan mountain nor in Jerusalem does 
God choose to be worshipped any more than in 
any humble heart. 

Paul was the chief of Apostles, and yet he did 
not claim to speak with any such authority as he 
allowed to the Old Testament. In writing to the 
Romans he recognizes that they are * 'filled with 
all knowledge," and yet he ventures to admonish 
them, not to command them, simply because of 
the grace given unto him "to be a minister of 
Christ Jesus unto the Gentiles/ ' He "beseeches," 
not commands, the quarrelsome Corinthians to 
put aside their contentions; and again, "not that 
we have lordship over your faith." He gives his 
rebukes positively yet courteously, and on some 
questions on marriage he gives his opinions with 
reserve, or thinks he has the spirit of God, while 
on other matters he speaks positively, as their 
teacher and Apostle. He rebukes the Galatians 
sharply for their Judaizing but the most he says 
of his own authority is that he received his Gos- 
pel from God. More positive "command" does 



242 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Paul give to the Thessalonians that they with- 
draw from any that walk disorderly. He tells 
Timothy that the sacred writings which he had 
learned from his infancy, meaning the Jewish 
Scriptures, are "inspired of God," but has nothing 
to say of any Christian writings, his own or any 
other. Indeed, nowhere does he claim the same 
authority which he allows to the Old Testament. 

The Epistle to the Hebrews is from an un- 
known author, not from Paul. It is most clear 
in its accepted doctrine of the inspiration of the 
Old Testament, saying in the first verse that God 
had " spoken unto the fathers in the prophets in 
divers portions and in divers manners"; and the 
whole argument of the superiority of the Chris- 
tian dispensation to the Jewish people is based 
on the authority of the Old Testament, which it 
quotes in the words: "The Holy Ghost also 
beareth witness to us"; but the writer depends 
on such authority and not on personal inspira- 
tion for his own claim to acceptance. 

No more do the shorter Epistles of James, 
Peter, John, and Jude make any claim to divine 
inspiration. They simply exhort as any teacher 
might. But the case is somewhat different with 
the Revelation, which is assigned to John, ap- 
parently the Apostle. It is in the form of visions; 
and the writer puts the most of it into the mouth 
of Jesus Christ or of angels; and by way of ex- 
ception to all the other books of the Bible the 



THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 243 

writer, at the end of the book, puts into the 
mouth of the Lord Jesus a curse upon any one 
who should add to or take from its contents. 
This must be understood as a most positive 
claim for the fullest inspiration and sanctity. 

And yet the Revelation, as it comes last in the 
New Testament, so was the last to be accepted 
as canonical. It was recognized in the second 
century by Papias and Justin Martyr, but was 
rejected in the same century by Marcion, and 
later was not included in the old Syriac Version 
and was generally rejected in the Eastern Church, 
and by Dionysius of Alexandria, Eusebius, and 
Chrysostom. But the Western Church held to 
it, and opposition to it gradually died out, al- 
though Luther put it, with Hebrews and James, 
among books of doubtful canonicity. It is hardly 
probable that it was written by the Apostle John, 
quite as likely by John the Presbyter, and it 
belongs to the list of a number of books on the 
last things, a subject which much fascinated 
imaginative spirits. This is far the best of the 
whole class, but I can see no internal or external 
reason for believing that it bears divine authority. 

If, then, not one of the writers of the New Testa- 
ment, except the writer of the Revelation, the 
most doubtful of all, claims for his work any such 
inspired authority as he allowed to the whole Old 
Testament ; and if the same is true for the writers 
of the Old Testament, except as three books of 



244 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the Pentateuch and the prophetical works claim 
to include certain revelations from God, how 
does it happen that the doctrine of inspiration 
for each of the two Testaments as a whole has 
grown up ? It is clear that no special act of in- 
spiration first gave its accrediting to either Testa- 
ment as a whole, but that the separate books, 
one after another, came to be held as sacred and 
one was added to another until the time came 
when the collections were held to be complete. 

I take it that, for the Hebrew Scriptures, as 
the literary period advanced after the Captivity 
and the return, and as the development of the 
synagogue advanced in its provision of local wor- 
ship, rolls were gathered, first of the Pentateuch, 
and later of the prophetic books, and finally of 
the Psalms and kindred collections, to be read 
at Sabbath services. The synagogue would pro- 
vide for the community its library and school; 
and other books of value beside those purely 
religious might be read, such as were historical, 
or romances like Esther, Ruth, and Daniel, which 
were among the latest to be accepted. 

Some, like Ecclesiasticus and Judith, might 
have some currency, but not so as to be thought 
quite as valuable perhaps if not written in He- 
brew, or if of later composition. When read in 
worship and depended upon for religious and 
patriotic history, they would gradually acquire 
sanctity and even the original romance or the 



THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 245 

old love-songs would be accepted as history or 
figure. In our own day, we have seen the Book 
of Mormon and Mrs. Eddy's teachings on Chris- 
tian Science read with the Bible in worship and 
added by some to the canon. The process was 
gradual but sure; and while the three divisions 
of the Hebrew Scriptures were not held to be of 
equal sanctity, yet all were allowed divine in- 
spiration, and this result had been reached, as 
the New Testament books prove, before the time 
of Christ. Jesus and his disciples as well as the 
Jews inherited and accepted the doctrine without 
question. 

The process by which so many of the early 
Christian Gospels, Epistles, and other writings 
were chosen to form a sacred canon was much the 
same. The Christian synagogue became the 
church, and like the synagogue the church had 
its chest of valued books. There the children 
were taught and all the people worshipped and 
listened to the written words of the Apostles 
and other distinguished teachers. Thus Poly carp 
made a collection of the letters of Ignatius for 
the church at Philippi. Each church would make 
as good a collection as it could to be added to the 
Old Testament Scriptures. These would be read 
on the Lord's Day, and by the time a generation 
or two had elapsed, the new Christian books of 
the Apostles, and others near them, would come 
to be regarded as quite as sacred as the Jewish 



2 4 6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Scriptures. It would come gradually, and dif- 
ferent churches would have varying collections. 
Thus the West accepted the Revelation while 
the East rejected it, and in old manuscripts of 
the New Testament are included the Epistles of 
Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shep- 
herd of Hermas, while to these may be added the 
Gospel According to the Hebrews and that Ac- 
cording to Peter, and the two Apocalypses of 
Peter and Paul. Many such books dropped out, 
leaving by general consent those now printed in 
our Bibles. 

The result was that the best survived, and 
some perished. What was at first accepted as 
good and precious grew into sanctity, and to it 
was ascribed the same divine inspiration as to 
the Old Testament. Time ripens distinction. 
The church in Corinth quarrelled as to the pref- 
erence to be given Paul or Peter or Apollos. 
Washington and Lincoln were not canonized in 
their own day. There was no cult of Shakespeare 
and Milton while they lived. A generation or 
two had to pass before Milton could pen the epi- 
taph on Shakespeare's "honored bones," and a 
similar period had to elapse before Dry den's 
famous quatrain could rank Milton as the fourth 
and greatest of the world's epic poets. 

So it was with the New Testament books. 
Clement, about 90 A. D., quotes the Old Testa- 
ment abundantly, and with such formulas as 



THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES 247 

"The Scriptures bear witness/' "Thus saith the 
Holy Word"; but the New Testament books are 
never quoted by him with any such reverence, 
although he does speak of one of Paul's rebukes 
to the Corinthians as guided by the Holy Spirit. 
In the second century the condition has changed. 
Polycarp quotes the New Testament as author- 
ity more than the Old, and a little later Justin 
Martyr has given it full inspiration. In our day 
the New is properly accepted as superior to any 
part of the Old. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 

IN two previous chapters I have spoken of the 
Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, and 
have tried to show what testimony they 
give as to the claim that the writers had special 
inspiration from God. 

Believing, as I find evidence to believe, that 
God's hand can be seen in the creation and evolu- 
tion of nature, I have no difficulty in believing 
that God can act and has acted, under his own 
laws, in the course of human history. I can see 
no reason why he should not guide good men, of 
whatever nation, as teachers along the ways of 
goodness; but, as in his guidance of the course 
of nature, I would expect his action to follow a 
course of evolution, along which men should 
gradually learn more of him and more of good- 
ness and wisdom. I see no reason why an Elijah 
or Isaiah or John or Paul should not have had 
much of such guidance and inspiration, or why 
great and good men in later or earlier days might 
not have been thus favored, whether Zoroaster 
or Socrates. 

But I should not expect this light from heaven 

248 



INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 249 

to be blinding. It would not give more than 
could be received. The earliest history of man- 
kind makes them ignorant savages, and by a 
course of evolution they had to come from a 
condition somewhat higher than the beasts to 
one of civilization and intelligence. God might 
lead them up gently, patiently, by many hands 
which his had grasped. God's prophets would 
be imperfect men, and much imperfection and 
much error would be mixed with some new truth 
discovered and taught. 

I can see in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures 
no evidence of what is usually meant by inspira- 
tion; in much of them no evidence of more than 
any historian or other writer might attain. It is 
not in the history or the science of the Bible, any 
more than in its rhetoric, that we are to look for 
anything unusual; they are no better than what 
we find the literature of other ancient peoples to 
be; it is in the amazing appearance of the teaching 
of one supreme God of absolute justice and holi- 
ness. At first, as under a process of evolution was 
to be expected, he was the one God of the Jews, 
while other nations had other gods, but later, in 
the time of the Captivity, the Hebrew prophets 
rose to the conception that Jehovah was the only 
God, and the gods of the nations were but silver 
or gold or wood. No other nation reached this 
height of inspiration. Greece invented civiliza- 
tion, and from Greece alone has it spread to all 



2 5 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the world since; but it was only the Hebrew 
people that discovered, taught by their prophets, 
the worship of one only true God, Maker of 
heaven and earth, and beside him there is no 
God. By what miracle of insight or of divine 
revelation did they learn to worship this sole 
God, that insignificant little tribe of Egyptian 
slaves, fated to hold the highway of two hostile 
nations, the mightiest on earth, both vulgarly 
polytheistic, one worshipping "Isis and Orus and 
the dog Anubis, ,, and the other, on the Euphrates, 
annexing gods from every conquered nation and 
in terror of heavenly and earthly monsters and 
dragons innumerable; and right about them the 
many-named Baalim and Ashtaroth of the lesser 
Amorites and Syrians and Phoenicians. Why did 
this insignificant football of the nations, tributary 
or captive, find the one God whom the learned 
priests of Thebes and Memphis and Babylon and 
Nineveh, searching for a Dens Exsuperantissimus 
in their genealogies and hierarchies of deities, 
could not find — no, not even when the Heretic 
King of Egypt chiselled out the names of Egypt's 
gods that he might replace them for a decade or 
two with the mighty, many-handed god of the 
solar disk ? Here is history's great riddle, un- 
solved unless it be by special divine Providence, 
which made little Palestine the world's teacher in 
religion, as little Greece is its one master in cul- 
ture and civilization. Was there not here revela- 



INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 251 

tion to the soul rather than inspiration to the 
pen? 

It is impossible to prove this or any higher 
degree of special inspiration, for it would trans- 
gress no natural law of the mind, and it would 
be a matter of faith resting not so much on reason 
as on its reasonableness. It is reasonable that 
God may have guided, as a part of his providence, 
certain men anywhere and at any time to be 
teachers of their people. Miracles may be sup- 
posed to support inspiration, but the miracles are 
a part of the books for which inspiration is sought, 
and their genuineness is a part of the question, 
and is more in doubt than the inspiration itself. 
Really, the one main argument for the inspira- 
tion of the Hebrew Scriptures is that our Lord 
is, I doubt not, truthfully, reported to have 
treated them as such, referring to them as pro- 
phetic evidence of his Messiahship. To be sure, 
we may reply that the evangelists wrote two or 
three decades after his death, and gathered their 
reports of his words from memory and from stories 
current in the church and hardly verbally ac- 
curate, and very likely incorporated their own 
ideas of the fulfilment of prophecy; but, as the 
record stands, Jesus himself accepted the current 
Jewish notion of the inspired infallibility of the 
Old Testament, and it is almost certain that he 
was taught in the synagogue school to believe as 
every one believed. Whatever view is taken of 



252 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the divinity in Jesus, this is admitted by all : that 
he grew in knowledge from his childhood, that 
he did not know when he should return to earth, 
and that, if correctly reported, he was mistaken 
when he said that his second coming would take 
place during the life of that generation. Jesus 
was not alone in his acceptance of the prevalent 
doctrine of Scripture. But that doctrine had 
grown up gradually, and had no definite basis. 
Because the Jews of two or three hundred years 
before Christ had developed this doctrine, the 
Christian Church in the course of a hundred years 
or more added their own Scriptures to the in- 
spired canon. 

What is valuable in the Bible, Old Testament 
and New, is its truth rather than its inspiration, 
its religious truth and its historical truth. Chris- 
tianity depends on the truth in the Scriptures, 
not on their inerrancy; otherwise, if error were 
proved, that would overthrow Christianity. 

We do not need to search with a microscope 
to find errors of fact in the Bible. They are 
patent. The world of earth and stars was not 
made in six days. The meaning of the story in 
the very first chapter is not to be twisted and 
wrenched by hunting in the dictionary for a 
definition of "day" that will stretch it to mil- 
lions of years, for the question of meaning is 
purely literary, not arbitrarily lexical, as if "The 
evening and the morning were the first day" 



INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 253 

could cover a whole geologic period. The truth 
of the chapter is not in the details of the pano- 
rama but in the grandeur and sublimity of the de- 
tailed conception that God was the author of 
the firmament above and the earth and the 
waters beneath. That truth we can believe and 
accept, and disbelieve all the rest. 

Nor do we have to believe that all men and 
beasts perished from the earth, except those in 
Noah's ark. With our knowledge the story is 
absurd; and we know that it is an older Baby- 
lonian legend cleansed of its polytheism to fit it 
to the acceptance of those who worshipped one 
only God. Just as absurd is the myth of the con- 
fusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. We 
can smile at the credulity which lengthened out 
the lives of the patriarchs, Terah 205 years, his 
son Abraham 175 years, Isaac 180 years, Jacob 
147 years, Joseph no years, and Moses 120 years, 
at a time when we know from contemporary 
Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions that the 
ordinary period of life was not exceeded. 

It is a comparatively simple thing to separate 
the legendary from the historical period in the 
annals of Israel, and to see in both the develop- 
ment of the pure faith of monotheism. History 
depends upon writing; and it is not likely that 
the Hebrews had any writing in their own lan- 
guage before the time of David. Of course, the 
Egyptians and Babylonians had their compli- 



2 54 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

cated pictographic or syllabic systems of writing 
long before, and the Babylonian system and lan- 
guage were used in Palestine, we know, till near the 
time of Moses for international correspondence, 
but it is exceedingly improbable that the books 
of the Pentateuch were written first in Baby- 
lonian or Egyptian and translated centuries after 
into Hebrew. It is much more likely that the 
so-called Five Books of Moses were composed 
some considerable time after the civilization that 
grew up with David and Solomon; and this ac- 
counts for not a little of legend and miracle in 
them. The freedom of composition is illustrated 
by the fact that in so solemn a document as the 
Ten Commandments the reason given for keeping 
the Sabbath in Deuteronomy is entirely dif- 
ferent from that given in Exodus. 

But misapprehensions as to the distinction be- 
tween history and legend are far less serious than 
moral or religious imperfections, and such there 
certainly are, and not a few of them, in the Old 
Testament, and perhaps in the New. We must 
expect them if the understanding of duty and 
the knowledge of God come by slow development 
of ages; the new seed will not at once crowd 
out the old weeds. Indeed the whole sacrificial 
system common to the nations about them, at 
first polytheistic and later purified by monotheism, 
was based on a false conception of God as a being 
who has to be placated and bought off by the 



INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 255 

most precious gifts, even to the first-born, and the 
prophets had to protest against dependence upon 
it; and Christianity had to reject it all and save 
it only as a type of Christ. 

But why should we be surprised to find that 
writers of the Jewish Scriptures fell behind our 
ethical standards, when we have not ourselves 
ceased from going to war, and honor soldiers as 
a superior caste ? I cannot read portions of the 
Old Testament without wishing that their trans- 
lation into new missionary languages might be 
long delayed, and that children might learn the 
New Testament before the Old. We should not 
make too much of the Old Testament; it is far 
from perfect. It is not to edification to read of 
the seventy men of Bethshemesh whom God slew 
for looking into the ark when it was sent back by 
the Philistines; or of Uzzah, who died later be- 
cause God was angry with him when he tried to 
steady the ark when it shook as David was 
bringing it to Jerusalem; or of Elijah the prophet 
slaying the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal; 
or of Elisha cursing in the name of the Lord forty- 
two little children who had rudely called him a 
baldhead and were killed by bears. Among the 
prophets there are not a few whole chapters, as 
in Ezekiel and Amos, not fit to be read in public 
worship because of the vengeance which they de- 
mand against the enemies of Israel. There is in 
them none of the spirit of Jesus. And even in 



2 5 6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the New Testament we are sometimes disturbed 
because what Jesus said or did seems wrong, and 
we cannot help asking if the tale be true : as when 
our Lord is said to have cursed the barren fig- 
tree, which belonged to somebody, and it withered 
away; or when he was asked to leave a city be- 
cause he had destroyed a herd of swine; or when 
he forbade his disciples to teach, as they went 
two and two, outside of Jewry, because he was 
sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Or how can 
we at this late day be expected to approve, even 
if we can credit, the sudden execution, by the 
malediction of Peter, of Ananias and Sapphira 
for "lying to the Holy Ghost" ? 

If a stringent theory of inspiration, whether 
we call it inerrant or plenary, fails when judged 
by either history or morals, it equally fails when 
we test the New Testament by its interpretation 
of the Old. No scholar would now dare to use 
the Old Testament in argument as the writers of 
the New Testament use it, getting in a rabbinic 
way meanings out of it that were not in the mind 
of the old prophet. The first chapter of Matthew 
quotes a prophecy, "A virgin shall conceive," 
etc., as fulfilled in the birth of Christ; but it has 
no plausible relation to Jesus; for Isaiah goes on 
to tell Ahaz that before her child is old enough to 
know good from evil his two enemies, the kings 
of Syria and Samaria, would die. In the next 
chapter Matthew quotes the words of Hosea, 






INSPIRATION OP THE SCRIPTURES 257 

"Out of Egypt have I called my son," as ful- 
filled in the return of the infant Jesus from Egypt, 
when it is perfectly evident that the quoted pas- 
sage is not prophetical but looks backward: 
"When Israel was a child then I loved him, and 
I called my son out of Egypt," and Hosea goes 
on to say that after coming out of Egypt Israel 
turned back to idols. The book of Hebrews offers 
what we should call illegitimate expositions of 
Old Testament passages which suffer a verbal 
dislocation, as when in the first chapter the pas- 
sage, "I will be unto him a Father and he shall 
be unto me a Son," which was addressed definitely 
to David, is made prophetic of Christ. So through 
two chapters the author proves that Jesus is 
greater than Abraham on the basis of a verse 
which says: "Thou art a priest forever after the 
order of Melchizedek," which has no bearing on 
his argument. 

But, as I have said already, the value of the 
Bible, as of any other book, depends on the 
truth, especially the new truth that it brings us. 
It is to be expected that it will retain errors be- 
longing to its times, for without error it would 
not be comprehended or received by the people 
to whom it was addressed. And this is true even 
though it contain ethical errors and imperfect 
views of God. Every failure to see moral obliga- 
tion clearly involves a relatively false view of 
God; for God is our highest conception of what 



258 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

is right. Even yet are we gaining truer views of 
right and wrong. We understand duty better 
than it was understood in Paul's day. Paul knew 
that in Christ there was neither bond nor free, 
but he gives no sign of knowing that slavery was 
wrong. For aught he could see woman was a 
subject sex; we free both women and slaves. 
Jesus had taught that God was a loving and for- 
giving Father; Paul could not get beyond the 
idea of expiation and appeasement of God by 
sacrifices, and from him and the author of He- 
brews the doctrine came which Milton puts into 
the mouth of God speaking to his Son in the 
heavenly conclave, that Adam, because of his sin, 

" To expiate his treason hath naught left, 
But, to destruction sacred and devote, 
He with his whole posterity must die: — 
Die he or Justice must; unless for him 
Some other, able, and as willing, pay 
The rigid satisfaction, death for death." 

That is Old Testament teaching, the teaching of 
justice, righteousness, not the full Christian doc- 
trine of the parable of the Prodigal Son, of full, 
free, fatherly love. And so it is that too many 
of us have regarded the Second Person of the 
Trinity as the expression of the infinite love of 
God, and the First Person of the Trinity as the 
expression of God's stern punitive justice. 

But I will be asked: "If you deny an infallible 



INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 259 

Bible, what have you left? You are — are you 
not? — an infidel, an unbeliever, left like other 
pagans to the bare light of nature." We are 
used to hearing that reproach from Uzzahs who 
rush to steady the ark. It is better — it is safer — 
to seek after the cold truth than it is to try to 
bolster up faith. But Christianity surely does 
not depend on the possession of an infallible 
Scripture. It depends on the spiritual truth in 
the New Testament, on the true conception of 
God as Father, on love for others as the regnant 
principle of life as against self-culture or any 
other coarser form of selfishness; on the king- 
dom of God to be created on earth by that love 
expanding over all humanity; and, historically, 
it depends on the person of Jesus, the Christ, 
whose teachings, life, and death initiated the 
highest of all religions. But it is his teachings 
which we must accept, and not any matters of 
history about him, from his birth to his resurrec- 
tion and ascension. They only are of cardinal 
and essential importance; for love affects char- 
acter, while history, correct or incorrect, bears 
only on intelligence. 

What, then, is left when I venture to question 
and doubt, or even to deny, on the basis of my 
own reason, statements which I find in the Bible, 
and to disapprove matters of morals, theology, or 
religion recognized not unfavorably in the two 
Testaments ? This is left : the search for and dis- 



2 6o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

covery of God in the myths of the childhood of 
the race, the grandest discovery to which the 
mind of man, wandering among portents and 
omens and dreams, has ever been guided, the 
story of the marvellous discovery, scarce credible 
where made, that God is one and that he created 
and rules the world. The great fact was learned 
by the teachers of an insignificant tribe, but its 
implications had to be slowly found; and I see 
in the successive books of the Old Testament a 
clearer and ever clearer sense of God's holiness, 
and of the obligations of justice and right as 
resting on men. It is worth while, greatly worth 
while, to possess this unique collection of writings 
of prophets and psalmists and historians, utterly 
unique in the history of ancient literature, with 
whom God and righteousness were supreme, and 
from whose Hebrew faith alone we have inherited 
our knowledge of God. When I try to conjec- 
ture how this sublime vision and this wonderful 
succession of seers and sages was able to conceive 
and teach what was hidden from more gifted and 
cultured nations, I do not find it easy to believe 
that it all came through some mysterious special 
genius for religion, and I find it easier to see the 
proof of the guidance of that indwelling Spirit of 
God which we call inspiration, not knowing how 
or where it may work. 

And much more is left. I see in the New Testa- 
ment the Mosaic religion suddenly rejuvenating 



INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 261 

itself and developing into Christianity. I see 
Jesus an utterly new sort of prophet, announcing 
and promising the kingdom of heaven to spread 
over the earth. That was new; it is not in the 
Old Testament. I find a new doctrine of God 
and a new doctrine of man — of God as Father, 
which is, being interpreted, God is love; of all 
men as brethren, and the duty to treat them with 
love, all of them, Jew and Gentile, and to sacrifice 
for them, to die for them if needful, to teach them 
the good news of the love of God and of the king- 
dom of heaven which is the kingdom of love. I 
find God brought very near to us in this world, 
and the promise of the world to come. 

All this constitutes a new religion, a religion 
the world had never known, a religion of loving 
worship toward God, and a religion of all possible 
social service toward men. The first Christians 
were noted because they loved one another, and 
buried the unburied bodies of the pagan poor 
about them. I may not be sure that the very 
fulness of God dwelt in the man Jesus ; but God's 
wisdom, which was with God from the beginning, 
his Logos, dwelt mightily in Jesus, and allowed 
him to give to man a better knowledge of God 
by far than the world had ever learned, even from 
the best of Hebrew prophets. And I and any one 
can see that Paul and the other Apostles caught 
much of his spirit, and spread it abroad after his 
death; and if I fail to see that they were wholly 



262 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

right when with one hand they discarded the 
Jewish ordinances ready to perish, and with the 
other made them the authority for a new sacrificial 
system of pardon for which love was enough, may 
I not see that the spell of Mosaism could not at 
once be fully thrown off, and that there was in- 
spiration enough left, so that the cleansing fire 
of its love might purge the remaining dross of 
the law of justice appeased by sacrifice; and we 
can approach directly to God, with the God in 
Jesus Christ as our Mediator, or even with no 
mediator at all, saint, or Virgin Mother, or Jesus 
Messiah? 

So I do not look on any doctrine of inspiration 
as essential or even important; but the truth 
which came so suddenly to the world in Jesus 
Christ, that is, the Christian religion, is of infinite 
value, and is such, apart from any theology about 
any way, additional to its evident truth, by which 
men have believed it to be accredited. 






CHAPTER XXI 
JESUS THE CHRIST 

THE old question, "Who do men say that 
the Son of Man is?" now is asked as 
earnestly as in the days when he went 
about teaching and healing; and however the 
answers may vary, so deep and wide has been 
his influence that there are few who cannot ac- 
cept Peter's confession, "Thou art the Christ, 
the Son of the living God." Who need measure 
his words when acknowledging the mightiest 
power that has ever moved the world ? 

Peter did not know what the words meant to 
which he was giving his assent. What was it to 
be the Christ, the Messiah ? He thought it was 
to be a lordly ruler over freed Israel, or even over 
the subject Roman Empire and the whole earth; 
he had to learn that it meant for him and his 
Master crucifixion and "content with death and 
shame," for his kingdom was not of this world. 
But through the centuries that have passed, and 
to the end of time, no badge of honor fails to 
yield place to the cross of the Christ. Jesus is the 
world's Messiah. 

Yet all we know of the life and death and resur- 
rection of Christ is what was written in four short 

263 



264 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

biographies, of which three repeat much, and the 
fourth is not so much a history as an exposition. 
The three are made up of various jottings and 
memoranda written first from memory of inci- 
dents and discourses, such as were repeated in 
meetings of the early Christians, collected in no 
such critical way as a modern scholar would 
write a biography, but compiled with all honesty 
and with all reverence as well as the authors 
could do it, a generation or more after the death 
of our Lord. Luke says he had many written 
sources, as doubtless had Matthew, and perhaps 
Mark, who must have heard Peter tell what his 
Master said and did. Of these three Gospels 
Mark is the oldest, and comes nearest to the 
primitive tradition ; while in a half-century, more 
or less, before the Gospels of Matthew and Luke 
were compiled there had been time for accretions 
and embellishments to have grown up on the 
simple but wonderful story of the life of Jesus. 
Paul does not seem to have known anything of 
any of our present four Gospels. Pious invention 
added other stories to the life of Christ, some of 
which we have in Apocryphal Gospels never ac- 
cepted in the canon, but which illustrate the 
growth of myths which always form an accre- 
tion about the life of a hero. So we have the 
story of Washington and the cherry-tree, and in 
late days a cycle of miracles has sprung up around 
the founder of the Babist sect. 



JESUS THE CHRIST 265 

Of the teachings of Jesus as variously reported 
in the Synoptic Gospels nothing need be said be- 
yond what I have already said, that the world 
has accepted them as the new revelation of God 
as love, and of love to all humanity as the highest 
expression of duty, as against all the ethical sys- 
tems that make self -culture the chief duty. The 
Emperor Julian, who knew Christianity and 
rejected it, said in his Oration to the Cynics: 
"The end and aim of the Cynic philosophy and 
of all other philosophies is happiness, along the 
line of one's nature." Such, he tells us, is the 
definition of happiness for the gods, that they 
fulfil their own nature, and make the most of 
themselves. The Christian ethics requires us to 
value others as much as ourselves, and so to 
sacrifice ourselves for others, thus making justice 
to our fellow men insufficient and making over- 
flowing love supreme. The teaching of Jesus is 
again new and supreme in religion in that it 
places no value on service of the hand or mouth, 
but only on the worship of the heart. Religion 
is solely spiritual. This is the new ethics and the 
new religion which Jesus brought in his teaching, 
and beyond which we have not gone, and, so far 
as we can see, never can go. All this is to be ac- 
cepted beyond doubt. We can judge of it. We 
are capable of judging, for the evidence is in our- 
selves; we respond to it. 

But as we read the Gospels the case cannot be 



266 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

the same as to the biography and history they 
have compiled. They have to be tested by the 
best critical judgment we have, and no other 
subject in all literary history has attracted so 
many scholars. It is a proper subject whatever 
our view as to inspiration, for our view of in- 
spiration must depend on what we first conclude 
as to the veracity of the reports of the acts of 
our Lord, and especially as to the miracles re- 
lated about him. The evidence as to their truth 
we are obliged to sift, for it is not such as we 
would accept now as related to some modern 
teacher or claimant. It is the reports coming we 
do not know from whom and gathered by quite 
uncritical compilers who differ on many minor 
and some major matters. I have heard it often 
said that Jesus was so wonderful a teacher that 
his divine teaching accredits his miracles. But 
that is a topsyturvy argument. The purpose of 
the miracle is to accredit the teacher; not of the 
teacher to accredit the miracle. 

I am not conscious of any prejudgment against 
miracles. I have been taught to believe in them 
and have accepted them, certainly some of them, 
but I admit that my faith in them is less than it 
was; partly because the evidence for those of 
the Old Testament is so weak, and the proof for 
those of the New Testament by no means such 
as we might desire for evidential purposes; and 
partly because they have become of much less 



JESUS THE CHRIST 267 

evidential value since burden of proof is now re- 
quired to support the miracles and not the teach- 
ing. Indeed, the miracles have come to be a weak- 
ness rather than a strength. Of one miracle this 
is not true, the miracle of the resurrection of our 
Lord. If that can be depended upon it is of very 
great help in supporting the teaching of our Lord 
as to the future state. 

And yet I find in myself a growing hesitation 
about accepting second-hand witnesses to the 
miracles of the New Testament. I believe no 
man living has ever seen a genuine miracle. I 
do not believe that any one has seen a miracle 
since the days of the Apostles. A multitude are 
reported every year: miracles are cheap; but 
yet we do not believe in them. We believe the 
laws of nature are not transcended. Are the 
stories true told of miracles in Christ's day ? Not 
one of the writers of the New Testament claims 
ever to have seen a miracle. The Matthew Gos- 
pel is said to have been based on an Aramaic 
writing by the Apostle Matthew, but that is lost. 
Mark was not an eye-witness, nor Luke. We do 
not know who wrote the Fourth Gospel, John the 
Apostle or John the Presbyter, or some one else; 
but it is a didactic work rather than a biography, 
written to magnify Jesus as the Son of God. The 
nearest we have to an assured eye-witness is 
found in the first verse of the First Epistle of 
John, if that was written by the Apostle, which 



268 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

says: "That which was from the beginning, that 
which we have heard, that which we have seen 
with our eyes, that which we beheld and our 
hands have handled, concerning the Word [or 
word] of life (and the life was manifested, and we 
have seen and bear witness, and declare unto you 
the life, the eternal life, which was with the 
Father and was manifested unto us) ; that which 
we have seen and heard declare we unto you also, 
that ye also may have fellowship with us; yea, 
and our fellowship is with the Father and his Son 
Jesus Christ. ,, And he goes on to say that "the 
message we have heard from him," is "that God 
is light," and that we should not "walk in the 
darkness." There is not in the whole Epistle one 
reference to a miracle, not even to the resur- 
rection, only to abiding in God. But it is by no 
means agreed that the Epistle was written by 
John the Apostle, and there is serious reason to 
believe that the First Epistle of Peter, which does 
plainly mention the miracle of the resurrection, 
was not written by the Apostle. 

The Gospel miracles are those of healing, the 
virgin birth, and the resurrection. One might 
as well deny that Christ lived at all as to deny 
that he was a healer. There is no intrinsic im- 
probability in the statements that he healed the 
sick. We have had healers in every generation, 
followed by thousands, multitudes of whom de- 
clared they had been healed from real diseases; 



JESUS THE CHRIST 269 

and as old pagan shrines were crowded with ef- 
figies of portions of the body healed by prayers 
and vows to the gods, so the walls of churches 
have been covered with crutches and trusses 
thrown away by invalids who follow some Zionist 
healer or popular saint. But the diseases cured 
are usually those caused by a nervous breakdown, 
for the cure of which faith has a marvellous power. 
Such were many of the diseases healed by our 
Lord, who required faith of his invalids; and 
where there was little faith, as in his own city of 
Nazareth, we are told that he could not do many 
mighty works there. But this explanation will 
not hold in cases of leprosy, nor of those born 
blind, nor those raised from the dead. Either 
those were genuine miracles or they were legends 
that had grown up during the generation or more 
after our Lord's death before the Gospels were 
composed. It is the most natural thing in the 
world that such myths should arise. We know 
of legends not incorporated in the Gospels, such 
as that of the infancy, which reports Jesus at 
play as a child, making sparrows of clay, while 
the sparrows made by his companions remained 
clay, but those made by the boy Jesus took wing 
and flew away. We reject the miracle at once as 
too puerile, under the Horatian literary rule not 
to have a god intervene unless the occasion is 
worthy; and this is not worthy; and for this 
same reason I would reject the Old Testament 



2 7 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

miracle of the borrowed axe that was made to 
swim. 

If a multitude of stories and legends were likely 
to grow up in the first half-century about the 
wonderful teacher and healer, as we know was 
the case during the first century, and if, even, as 
in the Gospel of John, religious teaching could be 
told in the form of miracle stories, it may well be 
that stranger miracles than those really performed 
through an act of faith should have been included 
in the three Gospels, such as those of the raising 
of the dead. Faith, we all know, will work won- 
derful miracles of healing, and, in a community 
which easily believes, tales of wonder grow as 
easily. I must hold — I cannot help it if I would — 
that it is our duty, seeking truth, to sift the evi- 
dence and sift the miracles, with this assurance, 
that for us the miracles are not needed to support 
our faith in the teachings of Jesus Christ as to 
duty toward God and man. The teachings of 
our Lord justify and prove themselves. We can- 
not go back on them ; but, granting conduct to be 
pleasing to God, whatever conclusion we honestly 
reach on matters of history or philosophy, be we 
wise or ignorant, we shall still abide in the taber- 
nacle of his love. 

The miracle of the virgin birth requires sepa- 
rate consideration, for much more is made of it 
now than was made by the Apostolic Church. 
It is not mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, but 



JESUS THE CHRIST 271 

is added in the later Gospels of Matthew and 
Luke. Nowhere else is it referred to in the Bible. 
Paul never refers to it to the special glory of Jesus 
as the Son of God, nor does the author of He- 
brews. If they did not know of it, or did not find 
it an important doctrine, I do not see how it is 
important for us. Indeed, God could beyond 
question as easily have put the fulness of his 
spirit into Jesus having a human father as into 
Jesus with only a human mother. If he had no 
human father, that could be known only to Mary 
herself and could in no way be proved, and it 
certainly was not known to the people of Nazareth, 
who believed him to be the son of Joseph; and 
it is strange that Mark does not tell so astonish- 
ing a thing in his Gospel. The story told in Mat- 
thew and developed in Luke looks to me like a 
beautiful embellishment of the Gospel story, con- 
ceived to give the additional honor which seemed 
to the writers to be properly due to the Messiah, 
and suggested by the prophecy, "A virgin shall 
conceive and bear a son," which had no such 
meaning as was put upon it, but which, under 
the very loose Jewish way of exegesis, and applied 
to Jesus, might require him to be born of a virgin. 
But it would seem that the story of birth without 
human fatherhood, though unfamiliar to Hebrew 
thought, was familiar to Greek fable, which had 
multitudes of heroes begotten by the gods of 
human maidens, and I cannot deny that, ex- 



2 72 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

quisite as the story is and ever dear as it will be 
to us, it represents a pagan view, and, while meant 
to honor Jesus and Mary, it does not honor God. 
Yet I do not want to lose it any more than I want 
to lose the sublime story in Genesis of the crea- 
tion of the world in six days, with its Sabbath 
rest. 

The final miracle of Christ is that of the resur- 
rection and ascension. Unlike the infancy story, 
we have the fullest evidence from the earliest rec- 
ords known to us that the resurrection of Jesus 
from the dead was universally accepted as a fact 
by the church. On it Paul based his ministry. To 
be sure, he had had a spiritual vision of the risen 
Christ and regarded himself as a witness; but he 
also knew and believed in the resurrection on the 
third day, and he tells the whole story in a sort 
of confession of faith, "that Christ died for our 
sins according to the Scriptures; and that he was 
buried; and that he hath been raised on the third 
day according to the Scriptures; and that he ap- 
peared to Cephas; then to the twelve; then he 
appeared unto above five hundred brethren at 
once, of whom the greater part remain until now, 
but some are fallen asleep; then he appeared to 
James; then to all the Apostles; then last of all, 
as to one born out of due time, he appeared to me 
also." What Paul believed they all believed. 
Again and again in his Epistles he mentions 
Christ's resurrection from the dead, and bases on 



JESUS THE CHRIST 273 

it the whole weight of his ministry. If Christ 
be not risen Paul's whole life is a blunder; and 
when' he attacks those who say the dead rise not, 
he bases his argument on the acknowledged fact 
of Christ's resurrection. The repeated appear- 
ances of our Lord after his death are his argu- 
ment, they being accepted facts of general knowl- 
edge among the believers. So this miracle of our 
Lord's resurrection from the grave has vastly 
more evidence than any or all other miracles in 
the Bible. I cannot easily explain why the total 
church should have accepted this belief if it were 
not true. To be sure, if there were not so many 
witnesses, a myth might have arisen out of the 
willingness to find a prophecy of Hosea fulfilled, 
"After two days will he revive us; on the third 
day he will raise us up and we shall live before 
him" ; or we may recall the statement of the Jews 
that the disciples might enter into a conspiracy 
of deceit. But that seems improbable and at the 
time hopeless. 

If one refuses to accept a miracle as in the 
course of nature impossible, some explanation of 
the origin of the myth must be conjured up, even 
to the assumption of an American and one or 
two German scholars, that no such person as 
Jesus ever lived, and that the whole story of his 
life and death is a colossal delusion. But this 
last is past belief; and, with the evidence at hand, 
it is easier — apart from the antecedent denial of 



274 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

any possible miracle — to believe that Jesus did 
rise from the dead than that so many witnesses 
were deceived by an imagined apparition, or that 
they invented the story to their own sure persecu- 
tion and death. I do not say that it is finally 
and absolutely proved that Jesus arose from the 
dead in such a form that he could be seen and 
recognized, but no hypothesis otherwise to ex- 
plain the fact that the belief was universal in the 
church immediately after his death and was at- 
tested by so many witnesses seems to me plausible. 
For his faith in this miracle Peter died. I recog- 
nize that the acceptance of this one stupendous 
miracle makes other miracles, otherwise insuf- 
ficiently substantiated, considerably more credible ; 
but that is all. I also recognize that my satis- 
faction in accepting our Lord's resurrection as 
being, as Paul says, the assurance and first-fruits 
of our resurrection into immortality, may pos- 
sibly warp my conclusion in its favor; but it 
surely is not my conscious desire to let my wishes 
guide my conclusion. This I say, that if the evi- 
dence appears to lead to the belief that Jesus did 
rise from the dead, and did appear to the twelve 
and to many others, then I am glad; but yet the 
disbelief would not, whatever Paul's hasty lan- 
guage allows, affect the obligation of our conduct 
to obey the rules and life of the Christian religion 
which Jesus promulgated, obeyed, and imposed 
on his disciples and now on all of us. 



JESUS THE CHRIST 275 

What, then, am I to think of Jesus ? He called 
himself the Son of Man, and he allowed his dis- 
ciples to regard him as the promised Messiah. 
They called him the Son of God, and John's Gos- 
pel says that in Jesus the Logos, the Word, which 
was in the beginning with God, which made the 
worlds, was made flesh in the person of Jesus 
Christ; and as such the Christian Church gen- 
erally worships him. He, Jesus, son of Mary, 
man like us, is, say the ancient creeds which we 
repeat, the very God in one of the three Persons. 

I cannot see that it is essential, or even im- 
portant, that we should believe this doctrine, that 
the fulness of the Godhead was incorporated with 
the human person of Jesus Christ. I do see that 
it is difficult to understand how man and God 
can be thus unified, but that difficulty is of little 
account, for we can know little of God's essence, 
except that he is a spirit, even as we can know 
little of the essence of our own spirits. Nor am I 
clear that the author of the Fourth Gospel meant 
to make Jesus the Second Person in the Trinity; 
and if he did mean it I find no reason for believing 
that he knew anything more about it than we 
can know. It appears to me that only God knows, 
and he has given us no statement on the subject. 
Any belief or disbelief is a deduction of reason, or 
an hypothesis devised to account for the facts. 

What does the Fourth Gospel say ? That in 
the beginning was the Logos, the Word with God. 



276 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Now this is just what in the eighth chapter of 
Proverbs is said of wisdom, which is there nothing 
more than a personified attribute of God. It was 
"before his works of old"; it was with him "when 
he established the heavens"; "when he made 
firm the skies above"; ever "by him as a master 
workman." Philo of Alexandria added to this 
personification a tincture of Greek philosophy. 
To him and to the Jews who held the name of God 
too sacred to be spoken with the lips, there was 
needed an intermediary for the Infinite One, one 
by whom all things could be made, and Philo 
translated the Hebrew wisdom into the Greek 
logos, word, and gave it entity, no longer ab- 
stract wisdom but Jehovah's substantial sub- 
stitute creator, who operates for him, for "by 
the Word of Jehovah were the heavens made, 
and all the host of them by the breath (spirit) of 
his mouth." Here the "word" is the spirit, and 
in Jewish interpretation easily separated by Philo 
from God himself. Philo's great effort was to 
relate Greek philosophy, Platonic and Stoic, to 
the Bible. He had the idea that the self -existent 
Jehovah, the "Am that I Am" is too transcendent 
and sublime a being to mix with matter, and so 
God created the world and rules it by his other 
self, his Logos, Word. The expression is Greek, 
and comes down through Heraclitus and Plato 
and Zeno and the Neo-Platonists to Philo, who 
found the "word" as well as "wisdom" in the 



JESUS THE CHRIST 277 

Bible. God needed an intermediary. He made 
the designs, the patterns, the "ideas" of things, 
and the Word fashioned them. This Logos Philo 
calls "the tool, the instrument of God." 

Alexandrian ideas, including those of Philo, 
were rife among the Jews of the first century, and 
among the Jewish Christians. Apollos was from 
Alexandria and, like Philo, was "mighty in the 
Scriptures," and doubtless in the same allegorizing 
way which we find in Hebrews. 

The first verses of the Fourth Gospel tell us 
that the Word was in the beginning with God, 
and was God, and by him were all things made. 
This is no more than was said of wisdom in Prov- 
erbs and the Apocryphal wisdom literature, and 
no more than what Philo taught of the Word. 
We are then told that the true light came into 
the world, and that he made the world. Then 
the true light must be the same as the Word. 
This true light, the world rejected. Then we are 
told that "the Word was made flesh and dwelt 
(tabernacled) among us, and we beheld his glory, 
glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full 
of grace and truth." Here the Word of Philo is 
said to have been incarnated in Jesus, and to 
have "tabernacled" among men with a divine 
glory. I cannot see in this the teaching that 
Jesus was the Second Person in the Trinity, but 
simply that he had in him the spirit of God, 
called here the Word of God, in a way far superior 



278 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

to that in which it was exhibited in John the 
Baptist, a way that was unique, as was expected, 
in the Messiah. The writer of the Gospel, in his 
purpose to show that Jesus was "the Messiah, 
the Son of the living God," made use of current 
philosophy, half Jewish, half Greek, to express 
his view of the greatness of our Lord. 

The other passage from which most directly 
the doctrine of Jesus as the Second Person in the 
Trinity is derived, is the baptismal formula at 
the end of Matthew's Gospel. The disciples are 
bidden to baptize "into the name of the Father 
and the Son and the Holy Ghost." I observe 
that these parting words of Jesus are not found 
in any of the other Gospels ; but they surely rep- 
resent what was a belief from the beginning in 
the supreme primacy of Jesus among men, as the 
Messiah, and as possessing a fulness of the spirit 
of God making him the one special messenger 
from God of truth and light. When the Gos- 
pels of Matthew and John had been accepted as 
sacred Scripture, as binding and as full of mean- 
ing as the Old Testament had come to be, it was 
easy to draw from these and other passages the 
conclusion that Jesus was the very God, God and 
man mysteriously united in one; and, indeed, 
the doctrine could hardly help following; and it 
was early supported by intentional corruptions 
of the text, as when in I Tim. 3:16 the confession 
of faith in Jesus, "He who was manifested in the 



JESUS THE CHRIST 279 

flesh," was by a dot in and a cross-line over an O 
made to read "God was manifested in the flesh.' ' 
I can see the spirit of God pre-eminently in Jesus, 
but whether the doctrine of three in one is true 
I have no means of knowing. God knows, and 
that knowledge it is not important that I should 
possess. Only goodness is really essential as 
taught by our Lord, for "grace and truth come by 
Jesus Christ,' ' and "of his fulness we have all 
received.' ' 



CHAPTER XXII 



THE FUTURE LIFE 



THE most solemn hour is the hour of death. 
The most solemn question a man can ask 
is, What comes after death ? 

One approaches this question with great awe, 
if he ventures to approach it at all. It is easier, 
pleasanter to evade the question, to rest in the 
easy faith of one's childhood, when he believed 
what he was told because he was told it, and was 
under no obligation to seek for himself the reason 
for what he was told. But we are not children; 
we are adults who have no right to believe any- 
thing except upon evidence presumptive if not 
conclusive of truth. We have been taught that 
there is a future state, that the soul is immortal 
and it has been believed the world over. It is 
not wholly a happy thing to raise the question. 
It conduces to happiness to believe what every- 
body always has believed, Egyptians, Baby- 
lonians, Greeks, and Barbarians, as if it were a 
self-evident fact that the soul lives after the body 
dies. But is it self-evident ? 

It did not seem self-evident to philosophers of 
old, and the wisest of them searched for reasons 

280 



THE FUTURE LIFE 281 

to convince themselves that the soul survives the 
body and they were not wholly satisfied with 
the proof; and Cicero took a chill satisfaction 
to himself in saying that if it should prove that 
he was mistaken in believing that he should meet 
his friends in the other world, none of those who 
had opposed his belief would ever be able to twit 
him for his error. 

It is a remarkable fact that the immortality of 
the soul, with its judgments of heaven and hell, 
found no place in the Old Testament religion. 
It is only in the latest fringe of the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures that we get, as in Daniel, a hint of a future 
life; but so dim was the faith that the ruling 
sect, that of the Sadducees, refused to believe in 
angel or spirit. The belief, I presume, came in 
under the Persian rule ; for Judaism looked kindly 
on the Zoroastrian faith of Cyrus, who restored 
the Captivity to Jerusalem; and the Jews were 
favored by his successors in the time of Nehemiah 
and Ezra. Thus we must except the Mosaic 
religion from the universal inculcation of belief in 
immortality; and yet as the story of the Witch 
of Endor shows, there must have been a popular 
heterodox belief in the ghosts of the dead. Saul 
called up the ghost of Samuel; and necromancy 
was punished with death under Mosaic Law. I 
am inclined to believe that the reason why the 
teachers of the Jewish religion made little or 
nothing of the future life is because it was in the 



282 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

neighboring Egyptian religion the central doc- 
trine of its paganism, elaborated in the Book of 
the Dead with strange ingenuity of imagination 
which invented a host of gods and demons to 
help or harass the soul on its perilous way to the 
judgments of Osiris and his forty-two assessors 
and to the realms of bliss. In Palestine, so long 
ruled by Egypt, the doctrine of the immortality 
of the soul could not escape the poison of poly- 
theism until the teaching of the Avesta, under 
the ruling Persian Empire, had replaced the many 
gods of Egypt and Assyria with the one supreme 
god Ormazd and the one almost supreme devil 
Ahriman. But in Sadduceeism the old rejection 
of a future life was retained ; and even our Lord, 
when he met this unbelief, had to use a Biblical 
argument against it which does not at all convince 
us; for the declaration, "I am the God of Abra- 
ham, Isaac, and Jacob/ ' does not so naturally 
mean, I am the God of the present living Abraham, 
Isaac, and Jacob, as that, I am he who was their 
God when alive. 

I am not clear why it was that primitive men 
came to believe in the future life. Yet it has ever 
been so involved with the belief in shadowy 
ghosts that appear to men in waking visions, and 
with the return of the dead in vivid dreams for 
encouragement or warning, that I am inclined to 
believe that it was because of what they had thus 
seen and heard that they came to believe that 



THE FUTURE LIFE 283 

the spirits of the dead still walked the earth. 
The gods also appeared in dreams, as various old 
stories tell us; and if there were gods, supposed 
to exist and appear in the condition of spirits, 
equally the spirits of men which appeared in 
dreams must continue to persist after death. 
But such a reason has no weight with us who 
understand better the origin of dreams; and it 
becomes a necessity for us, for our own intellec- 
tual satisfaction, to investigate the value of the 
reasons why we believe, if we do believe, that our 
souls, if we have souls, do not dissolve with the 
dissolution of the body. 

Because I am in philosophy a dualist and not 
a monist, a spiritualist and not a materialist, it is 
not difficult for me to believe in the immortality 
of the soul. The operations of knowing and 
reasoning and feeling and willing are of an order 
so different from those of weight and texture that 
it seems natural to believe, as the world has al- 
ways believed, that there is something that knows 
and feels quite other than the brain. The quali- 
ties, functions or activities of the body, such as 
growth and digestion, are visibly physical, ma- 
terial; while those which we are in the habit of 
referring to mind, such as love, judgment, pur- 
pose, are absolutely different, of another order, 
and cannot be described or investigated in the 
terms of physics. It is hard work for me to imag- 
ine that a complex of brain fibres can think, can 



284 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

compose an epic, can devise a cathedral, can guide 
a nation through peace and war, could create a 
civilization, or develop the Christian religion. 

If, now, we are right in believing that we have 
minds that inhabit and rule the body, but are 
not the body, then it is a reasonable presumption 
that the mind, which is not the body, is not so 
attached and fixed to the body that it must sink 
into annihilation when the body loses life and is 
dissolved. The great probability is that it sur- 
vives the death of the body. It is no complex of 
parts, as is the body, which can disintegrate and 
disappear. And if it can and does survive, we 
can see no reason why it may not continue to 
survive indefinitely and forever. We know of 
nothing that is annihilated. Matter may change 
its form or its combinations of atoms, but it 
never ceases to exist. The analogy favors the 
unending persistence of mind. If we have a soul 
at all, not material but spiritual, not brain but 
mind, it is easy to believe, and hard not to be- 
lieve, that it possesses the boon of immortality. 

Although I thus conclude from the non-ma- 
terial energies of the human will, feeling, and rea- 
son that the human soul is spiritual and survives 
the body, I have no right to avoid the question: 
Do not the lower animals show reason, feeling, and 
will, and do all these, from the protozoon to the 
elephant and the collie dog, possess an immortal 
soul as well as we ? Well, I do not know why they 



THE FUTURE LIFE 285 

should not, each after its measure. We live sur- 
rounded by innumerable millions of them in this 
little world of ours, most of them with but an 
infinitesimal intelligence, and others with a con- 
siderable degree of intelligence and affection, and 
even sense of duty; and this modicum of theirs 
does not crowd our more spacious minds that 
range on a higher level; and the infinite universe 
is big enough for them all, corporeal or incor- 
poreal. I might say, as many have said, that 
man's reason is different from animals' reason, 
and that man's reason is worth survival and im- 
mortality, while their reason is not. But I fail 
to see any difference in nature, only in degree; 
and so I have no prejudice against allowing that 
whatever has reason or instinct or will has a 
mind, and that mind may continue after death. 
To be sure, this objection is raised as if it were 
preposterous to imagine that the polyp of a 
sponge or a coral has an immortal soul, but to 
me it is not preposterous. The polyp is not so 
inferior to us as we are to the infinite God. 

Yet we know so little about what soul or spirit 
is that no one has the right to dogmatize on the 
subject. I can imagine that a feebly and scantily 
segregated soul might be resolved back into its 
original ether or primitive infinite spirit, while 
stronger and better compacted spirits might re- 
sist return to the vast profound of their original 
source. Even so some have surmised that the 



286 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

human soul which has too long sinned against 
the laws of its being will finally exhaust its 
strength and waste away. Such may not be the 
case, and the "eternal hope" of the final return 
of all to goodness is something better. Nature 
does not favor, and the normal mind dreads, anni- 
hilation : 

" For who would lose, 
Tho full of pain, this intellectual being, 
These thoughts that wander thru eternity, 
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost 
In the wide womb of uncreated night, 
Devoid of sense and motion? " 

Another satisfactory reason why I believe in 
immortality is because I believe in God. I be- 
lieve God is a spirit, and therefore I believe in 
spirit, and that there may be other spirits than 
the infinite spirit. If there is an infinite spirit 
it is almost incredible to me that there should 
not also be finite spirits. All the attributes of 
God, who somehow brought into existence all 
the forms of matter, would seem to assure us 
that he would somehow secure the creation of 
spiritual existences, of a vastly higher order than 
matter, and thus much more like himself. Such 
spiritual existences there seem to be and to have 
been, many thousands of millions of them, in 
the souls of men ruling their bodies, doing spirit- 
ual work; and I find it plausible, almost neces- 
sary, to believe that they have come from God, 






THE FUTURE LIFE 287 

and are little copies of the universal macrocosm. 
How many more there are in other worlds, or 
escape from other worlds, we can only guess. 
But if God has created such it seems likely that 
they will survive the death of the body, even as 
the ultimate elements of matter, escaping what- 
ever temporary combinations, persist unchanged 
and indestructible. Why should we not thus 
think of souls as unitary, as Plato thought of 
them, indissoluble, but residing for a while in 
bodies, and so capable of being combined into 
families, tribes, and nations, even as electrons 
are combined into atoms, molecules, and larger 
masses? The combination breaks up; families 
and nations constantly dissolve and reform; the 
soul of Abraham Lincoln is drawn away from the 
souls of the nation he has guided; and in turn 
every other soul is moved by a new force to 
leave its old attractions of kindred and friend- 
ship, but yet merely transfers its old attractions 
elsewhere after the manner of the coarser attrac- 
tions of physics. But the ultimate units remain 
indestructible, only gone over to new relations. 

I think that for me the principal assurance I 
have of immortality rests in my belief in God. 
It is much that I believe that there is such a 
thing as the spirit separate from the body, and 
therefore separable, so that the spirit does not 
necessarily dissolve with physical dissolution. 
It is much, to my heart, that there is testimony 



288 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

that once in Judea a man was crucified and died 
and afterward miraculously appeared and walked 
among men, as reported by men who died for 
their witness. But the value of these and other 
proofs is not absolutely conclusive. I and others 
can still question and doubt. To be sure, the 
argument drawn from the existence of God as an 
infinite spirit is not final, like mathematics, past 
possible question, but it seems to me so near 
demonstration that I rest in the belief. If there 
is one living great Spirit not shackled by physical 
encumbrances, it is incredible that there should 
not be others of a lesser grade, such as ours in 
the body and beyond the body. Because the 
divine spirit does not need a physical body lesser 
spirits do not need it. It is logical that those 
who deny the immateriality of the soul, who 
believe that the mind perishes with the body 
which created it, should usually rest their ma- 
terialism on atheism, or call themselves by the 
milder name of agnostics. 

I have already indicated that to my mind the 
miracles of the Bible are not sufficiently authen- 
ticated to be of conclusive value as proof of the 
existence of God. I have also said that the one 
miracle which has more support than all others 
combined is that of the resurrection from the 
dead of Jesus Christ. It is necessary to consider 
the resurrection of Jesus Christ as evidence of 
the existence of the soul after death. 



THE FUTURE LIFE 289 

The proof of Christ's resurrection rests on the 
concurrence of belief, in the very first generation 
of the church, that he did rise from the dead, 
and of the belief that there were many witnesses 
then living who had seen him after his resurrec- 
tion. Their faith is unquestionable, and they 
died for their belief. 

We may take and somewhat analyze the state- 
ments of Paul in I Cor. 15. It is a magnificent 
chapter, one to stir the blood of the reader, writ- 
ten by a mighty religious reformer, and yet a 
man of his day, and of his day's trend of thinking. 
In that chapter he treats of Christ's resurrection, 
and yet he surprises us by saying that there were 
those in the Christian body at Corinth who did 
not believe in the general resurrection of the dead, 
that is, who were Christian Sadducees, as Paul 
was a Christian Pharisee. Yet they seem to have 
believed in Christ's resurrection, and Paul argues 
from it as an admitted fact that the resurrection 
of his followers was to be expected, a most natural 
conclusion; although one is surprised, that any 
one could doubt the resurrection of the dead if 
they had ever heard of our Lord's teaching in 
Matt. 25 of the Judgment of the Last Day. Paul 
says most pertinently: "How say some of you 
that there is no resurrection of the dead ? But if 
there is no resurrection from the dead, then Christ 
hath not been raised." 

Paul declares that the resurrection of Christ 



2 9 o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

was the sum of his teaching: ''That Christ died 
for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he 
was buried, and that he hath been raised on the 
third day according to the Scriptures; and that 
he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then 
he appeared to about five hundred brethren at 
once, of whom the greater number remain until 
now, but some are fallen asleep ; then he appeared 
to James; then to all the Apostles; then last of 
all, as to the child untimely born, he appeared to 
me also. ,, Here is the list of witnesses, presented 
to the believers in Corinth, of those in Palestine 
who had seen the Lord after he had risen from 
the dead. It is not important to seek to compare 
this list of witnesses with those given in the Gos- 
pels, a matter for the labors of the harmonists. 
It is enough to gather the fact, of which there 
can be no doubt, that in Palestine it was believed 
by the whole church that hundreds had seen 
Jesus after he had risen from the grave. There 
is real weight to us in this indisputable fact, al- 
though that which so much impressed Paul, that 
he had himself seen the Lord, would not be evi- 
dence to us, for it was a vision; and a vision may 
be, and often has been, subjective. Paul had at 
least one other vision when he saw unutterable 
things; but frankly we must admit that his 
visions may have been the product of an intensely 
excited imagination. 

It is difficult so to explain the general belief 



THE FUTURE LIFE 291 

among the earliest Christians that their leaders 
and hundreds of others had seen Jesus alive after 
his death. To suppose them mistaken is to sup- 
pose that the Apostles, the chief witnesses, lied, 
and died for their lie, and that the other wit- 
nesses were a myth which the Apostles invented, 
nothing less than another lie, which was accepted 
by their credulous followers and by Paul. Paul 
was honest, for he really believed he had seen the 
Lord ; but I cannot see how Peter and James and 
the other disciples who had followed Jesus for 
years, not to speak of the mother of Jesus who 
lived with John, and the other women who fol- 
lowed our Lord, could have been mistaken in 
their belief that they had seen him again in the 
flesh. It may not have been in the flesh, although 
the story of Thomas's unbelief, and that of 
Christ's eating of fish, declare it was; but whether 
in the flesh or in a spiritual apparition, as not a 
few now hold, makes no difference as to the evi- 
dence of the continued existence of the soul after 
death. We need not concern ourselves with the 
nature of our Lord's resurrection body, which we 
are told passed through closed doors, for it is 
only his soul that this question has to do with. 

Yet I admit that the actual reappearance of 
Jesus in a visible form is so extraordinary, so 
unique, that one must be pardoned for doubting 
whether it be not a myth. No other case is 
known, even in the Bible, that would be credible 



2 9 2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

to this present generation. The story of Lazarus 
is told only in the Fourth Gospel, which is not 
history, but doctrine. The story is told as a 
parable is told, for the teaching attached to it. 
At this day if a teacher of new doctrines were 
arrested, tried, condemned, and beheaded, and a 
hundred of his followers, and as many opposers, 
saw the execution, and then if they and others 
said they saw the head restored to the body and 
again take full life, perhaps we who did not see 
it would believe their testimony, but scarcely any 
less degree of evidence would suffice us. The evi- 
dence favors the actual reappearance of Christ 
after his crucifixion, but we wish that such cases 
might appear in our own day, under more critical 
observation; and if there are those who still 
doubt, as we are told that "some doubted/ ' or 
as the Jews disbelieved who declared that the dis- 
ciples had stolen the body, we need not blame 
them, and we are under no obligation to deny 
them the Christian name. For what makes one 
a Christian is not what he intellectually believes, 
but how far he takes Jesus as Master and lives 
as his disciple. Because the resurrection of our 
Lord from the dead is unique, because we cannot 
cross-examine the evidence for it, because we can- 
not hear the other side, I do not find it easy to 
put on the evidence presented the full weight 
Paul put upon it, and died for its truth. It has 
weight, great weight; but I admit that I find 



THE FUTURE LIFE 293 

myself searching for other reasons, and resting 
even more weight upon them. 

The only positive and conclusive evidence by 
which we might hope to prove the persistence of 
the soul after death must come through actual 
communication with spirits of the departed. It 
is much to be desired that investigations in this 
direction be carried on until a general conclusion 
can be reached. Such a favorable conclusion I 
do not regard as hopeless. Such physicists as 
Sir Oliver Lodge, and other scholars who carry 
on the work of the Society for Psychical Research, 
believe the evidence already obtained is sufficient 
to prove that disembodied spirits do communicate 
with the living. I am among the majority who 
are not yet convinced. There are too many 
chances for error, or imagination, or even fraud; 
or, it may be, for transference of thought from 
the inquirer to the medium without any fraud 
on the medium's part. Should it ever seem clear 
that such communication takes place between the 
living and 

" The immortal mind that hath forsook 
Her mansion in this fleshly nook/' 

it would seem almost certain that such persistence 
involves immortality. The soul that can survive 
for years or centuries can almost certainly live 
forever, although the possibility is not excluded 
that it may disintegrate and fade away. 



294 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

We can hardly say that telepathy, if it be 
admitted as a real phenomenon, is a proof of the 
existence of the soul separate from the physical 
brain, and so of its persistence after death. Te- 
lepathy concerns the passage of thought between 
two distant but living persons ; and the two brains 
may be conceived of as themselves able to trans- 
mit and receive the current of thought. Yet this 
raises the question of the nature of the soul, and 
so of immortality. 

The evidence for telepathy is, I suppose, con- 
siderably stronger than that for communication 
with the dead. Almost every family has some 
mysterious story of its own. In my own family 
my father when a boy thought himself one night 
in great danger of being murdered, and at that 
same hour his mother received the impression, 
though many miles distant, that he was in great 
danger, and she rose from her bed and prayed 
for him. If there is truth in telepathy a thought 
can pass hundreds or thousands of miles from 
one mind, or brain, to another mind or brain. 
It must be carried by some medium, and we know 
of no medium but the ether. Now the sensa- 
tions we know of in the body are not carried by 
ether, but by the nerves. It would seem likely 
that the thought waves, carried plausibly and 
even probably by the ether, must find their source 
of origin and their receiver in something analogous 
to ether and thus able to act upon it ; or the trans- 



THE FUTURE LIFE 295 

mitting and receiving minds must actually be 
products of ether, just as is the case in wireless 
telegraphy, or light, or gravitation. For it is 
the movements of the ultimate electrons, which 
are merely modifications of ether, on which their 
power rests. May we not then think of the mind 
as the transmitting and receiving organ, and the 
ether as the conductor of thought; and the mind 
itself as a spiritual segregate of ether, just as 
electrons are the physical segregate; so that 
what Paul calls the spiritual body may be con- 
stituted of ether, and be the mind itself, or, if 
not, the ultrasubstantial organ through which the 
mind works, even as we may think of the whole 
infinite ether as the coeternal and coinfinite mys- 
tery in and through which the infinite God lives 
and works ? God's mind and will pervades ether 
and has its being in it; and I know of no sup- 
position more probable than that the human mind 
in its essence and substance is somehow ethereal. 
Sir Oliver Lodge hints as much when he says in 
''The Ether of Space," p. 123: 

We know that matter has a psychical significance, 
since it can constitute brain, which links together the 
physical and the psychical worlds. If any one thinks 
that the ether, with all its massiveness and energy, has 
probably no psychical significance, I find myself unable 
to agree with him. 

And he quotes Clerk-Maxwell, a chief master 
of physics, as saying, p. -117: 



296 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic 
matter [the ether] is fitted not only to be a medium of 
physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfil 
other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as 
yet no conception, but also ... to constitute the material 
organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind 
as high or higher than ours are at present — is a question 
far transcending the limits of physical speculation. 



Such a question physics cannot, it is true, 
answer, but philosophy and psychology can raise 
it and perhaps at some time answer it. For we 
have but just begun to gain a glimpse of the 
mystery of this insensible, impalpable substance, 
to our senses thin as nothing, yet so dense and so 
strong that it holds the moon from flying away 
from the earth by a force equal to that of a column 
of steel 400 miles in diameter holding our satellite 
to our earth. We do not know, but we may say 
that if out of the infinite and apparently eternal 
ether all material bodies have been segregated, 
it is possible that from the same source, as from 
the very body of God, human souls have also 
been segregated, and it is easy to conclude that 
as, when the body dissolves, each ultimate atom 
yet remains unchanged, so the soul unity may 
also persist independent of the body. 

Of course, I have not been able to prove con- 
clusively the immortality of the soul. Nobody 
can. Most of us take it on faith, without con- 
sideration of evidence, or simply because we wish 



THE FUTURE LIFE 297 

to believe. But the wish to believe is no proof, 
nor the general faith, nor the happy effect of 
belief. It is well, even obligatory on a thinking 
man, to question the grounds of his belief, so 
that he may believe, or disbelieve, or doubt in- 
telligently. I find a weighty preponderance of 
evidence that the soul survives death. 

What is the nature of the future state ? Every 
religion naturally teaches that it depends on life 
here. The good are rewarded and the evil pun- 
ished. So the New Testament — not the Old — 
teaches. It teaches by entrancing pictures of the 
glories of heaven, and by harrowing descriptions 
of the pangs of hell. Yet these are all material 
figures of what is purely spiritual. They need 
interpreting. Jonathan Edwards, I have been 
credibly informed, told the Indians to whom he 
preached that in hell they would have molten 
lead poured down their throats. He did not 
really believe it, but it conveyed the true idea he 
wished to present, just as when he pictured to 
his own congregation in Northampton the soul 
of the wicked held like a spider over a flaming 
furnace. All we can say as to the meaning and 
authority of such Biblical figures is that which 
nature also teaches, that sin is corrupting and an 
injury and a fearful loss to the corrupted soul. 
And so goodness is health and strength to the 
soul, and happiness also. As to the conditions 
and the degree of either happiness or misery we 



298 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

cannot judge from the pictorial language of 
Scripture, nor from reason apart from any ac- 
cepted revelation. It is enough to believe with- 
out doubt that it will be well with the righteous 
in this world and the next, and that it will not 
be well with the wicked. The material figures 
we may discard, the lake of fire with the stone of 
Sisyphus, the gates of pearl with the houris of 
Mohammed. 

Nor need we raise any questions as of impor- 
tance, as to the opportunity for repentance and 
restoration in the future life. It is enough to 
know that the soul's will is free to change for 
good or bad in this world or the next, and that 
God is and always will be good and merciful. If 
a soul chooses to turn from evil to good, no matter 
when, the good Father cannot help accepting him ; 
it depends on the will of the soul. So we cannot 
be certain, even from Scripture, but we are al- 
lowed to indulge the comfortable hope that some- 
how evil will at last come to an end; nothing 
more. 

If the soul does survive death, what then? 
That is the practical question. If the soul does 
survive death then we should live under the 
power of the eternal life. This life is but a vapor 
which soon blows away. Our duty is to live, in 
the language of the first of Jonathan Edwards's 
seventy " Resolutions,' ' as we would wish we had 
lived "never so many myriad of ages hence.' ' 



THE FUTURE LIFE 299 

It is profitable to believe in a future life; it 
helps us to live a good life during our little day. 
That is no reason for deceiving ourselves or 
others as to immortality, but if for satisfying 
reasons we believe in immortality, that belief 
should in all prudence affect our character. But 
the belief in immortality is not in itself essential 
to goodness; it is only helpful to goodness. And 
goodness is the only essential thing, not any be- 
lief whether in immortality or in God himself. 
So Paul went too far, spoke too hastily, when he 
fell short of the best Stoic philosophy and said: 
"If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, 
for to-morrow we die. ,, Whether the dead are 
raised or not the duty remains the same. We 
are not brutes, living only to eat and drink and 
escape pain. We have the sense of right and 
wrong; the consequences need not control us. 
To love others and to sacrifice or even die for 
them is right, is beautiful; and the obligations 
of character do not rest on the will or even on 
the existence of God, but on essential lightness. 
To be sure, many of us, apart from belief in God 
and the future 'state, will take the Epicurean view 
which Paul so hastily expressed ; for morals apart 
from religion are very weak. Even backed by 
religion morals are fearfully weak. They cannot 
prevent war. So all religions, except the Hebrew, 
have made much of the future life, and have 
created innumerable heavens and hells to attract 



3 oo WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

to virtue and to deter from vice; and when, to 
us who have reason to believe that the death of 
the body is but an incident in the life of the soul, 
our Lord presents the sublime panorama of the 
final judgment, his "Come, ye blessed/ ' draws us 
with the cords of love; and his "Depart, ye 
cursed" adds multiple intensity of force to our 
resolve to escape the fruit and penalty of sin. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 

WHAT I have to say on this subject is 
so simple, as it seems to me, so primary, 
so self-evident in its truth, that I might 
be inclined to doubt whether it is worth while to 
say it. Yet simple truth is the most important 
of all; and truth is likely to be simpler than error 
and more easily understood. If I have a sore 
tooth, that fact is simple and easily comprehended ; 
what is hard to comprehend is the error which re- 
quires me to believe that it does not ache, and to 
will away the pain. 

In considering the essence of Christianity, we 
must begin with fundamental things. Now, there 
are two big words that have to do with the con- 
duct of life, one true, the other right. They give 
us the nouns truth and duty. They belong to two 
different domains, the intelligence and the con- 
science. One considers what you must believe, 
the other what you must do. 

Both of these domains, truth and duty, are of 
infinite importance, and yet one is vastly more 
important than the other; for one infinite can be 

301 



3 o2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

bigger than another. An infinite plane is infinitely 
larger than an infinite line, and an infinite of 
three dimensions is infinitely larger than one of 
two. The value of truth is measureless; but the 
value of duty is measureless in a higher category. 

The fact that the value of duty is higher than 
that of truth is not one to be argued or proved. 
It is only to be asserted and claimed. If one does 
not see that moral character is better, higher, 
than intellectual ability, then let him live in his 
blindness; he cannot be cured. If there was once 
an English philosopher and judge who was rightly 
called both "wisest" and "meanest of mankind," 
then, in putting him up or putting him down we 
fix our own status in the realm of values. What 
is mean degrades vastly more than what is wise 
can lift, for lightness of conduct is vastly more 
worth than correctness of belief. 

(i) The science of the right is what we call 
ethics. It embraces the whole domain of duty. 
It includes duty to oneself, to one's friends, to 
one's enemies, to all men, to the beasts below us, 
to angels, to God, to all things and all beings, 
from dust to Deity. It is ethics that makes a 
maid sweep a room clean; it was ethics that made 
Abraham feed the angels; it was ethics that ac- 
cepted Gethsemane and the cross. 

Ethics is a bigger word than religion, for it in- 
cludes it. If ethics is the science of duty, it em- 
braces all duties to all beings, under all relations. 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 303 

But that part of duty which relates to God we 
call religion. Religion is, then, a subdivision, a 
large subdivision, under ethics. 

(2) The science of truth we call philosophy. As 
ethics asked only one question : What is right ? 
so philosophy asks only one question: What is 
true? Its domain covers the whole field of fact. 
It makes no exception — it asks on every possible 
subject, material, spiritual, human, divine, for the 
exact truth in all its relations. It reaches in its 
investigation from the minutest corpuscle or elec- 
tron, through all the waves of infinite ether, 
through all the phases of animal and human in- 
tellect, up to the very throne of God. It has its 
parts and divisions. That section of philosophy 
which has to do with God, we call theology. It is 
a part of philosophy, as religion is a part of 
ethics. 

Now, let this be kept in mind, that religion is 
a section of ethics, as theology is a section of 
philosophy. But before reaching our narrower 
topic, which is the essence of Christianity, let us 
consider ethics and philosophy a little further. 

Ethics, the science of duty, has one central 
rule out of which all duties are evolved — the rule 
of love, or altruism, if you will call it so. Do all 
the kindly, affectionate, self-sacrificing service you 
can for your fellow beings. It is not necessary to 
expand on this subject, only to state the central 
principle, which is love for beings in general, and 



3 o 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

which directs the expression of that love to our 
fellow beings under rules that relate to their 
amount of being and our relations to them, and 
our opportunities of service. 

But it is not at present possible to reduce phi- 
losophy, the science of truth, to a corresponding 
general formula. I have said that the central 
law of ethics is the love of the me for the not- 
me. I suspect that the basal problem of philos- 
ophy, the answer to which involves everything 
in the sphere of the knowledge of truth, of fact, 
is the question: What is the me, the mind, and 
what is matter? In the answer to this philo- 
sophical question all knowledge and science are 
involved. But we do not yet know. Lord Ray- 
leigh, the highest British authority in the physics, 
especially of electricity, was taken by an acquain- 
tance to see the operation of a very large electrical 
plant. The director of the works, who had failed 
to catch his name and to understand who he 
was, showed him everything, and explained it as 
if his visitor, who was far his superior in knowl- 
edge, were but a novice. At the end of the in- 
terview Lord Rayleigh, who had listened in 
silence, turned to his guide and asked: "What is 
electricity ?" "I do not know," was the answer. 
"Nor do I," replied the great scientist. Nor do 
we yet know what mind is, nor what matter is. 
We are not settled on monism or dualism; on 
realism or idealism; on substance or energy. 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 305 

This is the problem equally of psychology and of 
physics. We are learning new things that sur- 
prise us, of new chemical atoms, argon, helium, 
crypton, neon, xenon; of subatoms, corpuscular 
electrons a thousand times smaller than the atoms 
of hydrogen; of vortices and of ether; something 
we know of their properties, and we guess more, 
but what they are we know not. The essence of 
matter is beyond our ken. 

And so is the essence of mind. We know some- 
thing of its activities; we have analyzed them 
almost exhaustively, and are now beginning to 
study their relation to the nervous system. But 
how does mind work apart from matter ? Can it 
so work ? What minds are there ? Is there an 
all-embracing mind, of which smaller minds are 
a part, as the physicists now tell us, that there 
is an all-embracing ether in which the last atoms 
of matter may be such revolving rings as an ex- 
pert smoker puffs from his mouth ? We do not 
know. 

Now, let us come to our topic, which is the 
essence of Christianity. Christianity must have 
its relations to these two departments, one of 
ethics, the other of philosophy. 

Now, Christianity's definition of duty is precisely 
that of ethics. It is given by Christ; it is given 
by Paul. It is the law of love. "Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thy heart," "and thy 
neighbor as thyself"; "The greatest of these is 



3 o6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

love." There is no difference between ethics and 
Christianity on this subject. 

Then, what is the use of Christianity ? How 
does Christianity bring any increment to general 
ethics ? 

This, that Christianity taught ethics its an- 
swer. This is Christianity's patent, this doctrine 
of love. 

Judaism has a teaching of love, but this is 
not its predominant note. The chief demand of 
Judaism is righteousness, what we commonly 
call morality between man and man. This is all 
there is, so far as duties of man to man are con- 
cerned, in the Ten Commandments. It is simple 
righteousness, justice, morality. "Honor thy 
father and thy mother," the only positive com- 
mand. "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not 
commit adultery," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou 
shalt not bear false witness," "Thou shalt not 
covet." That is all, no love, not even mercy. 
The answer to the question of duty is given with 
special care in several passages in the Old Testa- 
ment. "What doth the Lord thy God require of 
thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God?" Here justice is put 
first, and mercy, a form of love, pity for the suf- 
fering, is given more than usual prominence as 
next to it. In the fifteenth Psalm the question 
of duty is formally asked: "Lord, who shall abide 
in thy tabernacle?" And the answer is very il- 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 307 

luminating as to the thought of Judaism on 
ethics. The answer is: "He that walketh up- 
rightly,' ' "worketh righteousness/ ' "speaketh the 
truth," "backbiteth not," "nor doeth evil to his 
neighbor, nor taketh up a reproach against his 
neighbor," by whom "a vile person is contemned," 
who "sweareth to his own heart and changeth 
not," who "putteth not out his money to usury, 
nor taketh a reward against the innocent." We 
are told that, "he that doeth these things shall 
never be moved." Here not even that form of 
self-sacrificing love which we call mercy is in- 
cluded in the list of the merits which assure the 
favor of God. 

The eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel is perhaps 
the most magnificent statement of Jewish ethics 
to be found in the Old Testament. It is of im- 
mense value for its vivid and emphatic state- 
ment of the value of individual personality. It 
is the chapter which tells us that no man shall 
be condemned for the sins of his father, and no 
man accepted for his father's virtue, but "the 
soul that sinneth, it shall die." Over and over is 
repeated the list of the virtues that bring the 
divine favor and the sins that God condemns. 
Here is the catalogue of virtues, so far as duties 
to one's fellow man are concerned, and they are 
mostly negative. First: "He hath not defiled 
his neighbor's wife," has done no injury to the 
primary law of chastity. Then he "hath not 



308 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

oppressed any"; then he "hath restored to the 
debtor his pledge"; then he "hath spoiled none 
by violence." Then comes an act of love in the 
form of mercy, he "hath given his bread to the 
hungry, and hath covered the naked with a gar- 
ment." Then the prophet returns to acts of 
justice: "He that hath not given forth upon 
usury, neither hath taken any increase, that 
hath withdrawn his hand from iniquity, hath 
executed true judgment between man and man." 
Of such a man it is said: "He is just, he shall 
surely live, saith the Lord." Doubtless such a 
man will live under any dispensation, old or new; 
but what I am here concerned with is the emphasis 
put upon justice, righteousness, honest dealing 
with one's neighbor, and the scantier recognition 
of the law of love. This is the clear ethical dis- 
tinction between the Old Testament and the 
New, that where the Old gives the primacy to 
righteousness, the New gives it to love. 

What has been said of the discovery, we may 
say, of love by Christianity as the supreme law 
of right, is equally, or more clearly seen to be 
true if we contrast the ethics of the New Testa- 
ment with the best ethics of Greece or Rome, 
or India or China. The greatest philosopher of 
Greece, Aristotle, wrote a special treatise, indeed 
two, on ethics. He declares that happiness is 
the chief end of man's existence, but that hap- 
piness consists not in pleasure, wealth, honor, but 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 309 

in a life of sound reason, or virtue. Virtue seeks 
out the mean between extremes of conduct. The 
highest happiness, and so virtue, " consists in the 
harmonious exercise of man's highest powers; 
and, since the chief of these are intellectual, the 
truest happiness is to be found in the life of Con- 
templation, or philosophic thought." 

I cannot need to show how different all this is, 
with its centring on self-culture, from the self- 
forgetfulness of Christianity, which seeketh not 
her own. A study of the ethical writings of 
Cicero would show a similar self-centred virtue, 
which puts justice before love; and the ethics of 
Buddha and Confucius are even further below that 
of Jesus. 

Thus it was that Christianity first taught 
ethics its first principle of love. In doing this, 
it showed that righteousness — justice, common 
morals — is not enough. Something more vital is 
needed, something more positive and forceful. 
Not to have done wrong is something, but it has 
in it nothing really divine. To do justice is but the 
neutral level of morals, not bad and hardly good. 

There is a Russian tale of a woman who died 
and was sent to hell. She was astonished and 
angry to find herself there. So she cried and 
screamed and called aloud to Saint Peter that he 
had made a great mistake in sending her there. 
11 1 don't belong here," she shouted; "I have never 
done anything wrong, I have never injured any- 



3 io WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

body." She raised such a disturbance that at 
last Peter heard her, and sent down a messenger 
to learn what was the matter. "I don't belong 
here," she cried, "I have never done anybody 
any wrong." "But what good thing, what kind 
thing have you done?" asked the spirit. After 
long thinking she remembered: "I once gave a 
poor woman a carrot. " ' ' That is something, ' ' said 
the spirit, "I will go up and see if anything can 
be done for you." Shortly after a carrot was 
seen let down by a cord, and it came to where 
she was. She seized it and was drawn up. She 
had got well up toward heaven when she felt a 
tugging at her skirts, and she looked down and 
saw two spirits holding on to her clothes and 
being drawn up with her. She cried to them: 
"Let alone of my clothes ! This is my carrot ! It 
won't hold us all !" Just then the carrot broke, 
and back she fell into hell; and the angels who 
were looking over the wall of heaven said : "What 
a pity, and she came so near succeeding." 

Christianity demands positive love, nothing 
less, and with that nothing more. It is not 
enough that one should aim for the full develop- 
ment of his nature; that is essential selfishness. 
It is a good part of education to develop and 
train one's faculties to their utmost power, but 
Christianity requires that this be done not for 
the sake of the owner of the faculties, but that 
the faculties may be fitted to do more service for 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 311 

other people. Thus culture is not the end of 
Christianity. It is good as a means of service, 
but is not the true end in itself. Nor even is it 
enough to make communion with God here, or 
enjoyment of him forever in another world, the 
chief end of life. Even that is selfish, and is not 
the dictate of anything higher than self-love. 
The answer which Christianity makes to the 
central question of ethics is love, and this an- 
swer is its glory and its justification. If it could 
not give this answer, it would have nothing new, 
nothing worth while. Its crowning gift to man 
is expressed in its great law of love to being in 
general, in proportion to its amount of being. 
This rule requires supreme love to God, and love 
to one's neighbor as to oneself. 

Now, if Christianity requires this love supreme, 
it requires a resolve to begin such a life. This is 
conversion. It is what conversion means. If 
you call it repentance, it is sorrow that you have 
not lived the life of love, and a determination to 
begin it. If you call it faith, it is accepting the 
law of love from God and his son Jesus Christ, 
with the assurance that you will thus be well- 
pleasing in his sight. Faith means the rejecting 
of all dependence on formal service, or intellectual 
creed, and the submission of the soul to the simple 
love of God. If you call it regeneration, it is still 
nothing but the love of God shed abroad in your 
heart by the Holy Spirit. 



3 i2 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Anything that brings this resolve of love is 
sufficient, and is essential if not complete Chris- 
tianity. All religions that have blindly secured 
it are so far good. Plato tells the beautiful story 
of the choice of Hercules, the mighty hero whose 
twelve labors were for the clearing of the earth 
of its evils, for the use of man. His choice was 
between a vile love and a divine love. The story 
is a Christian one, although it comes out of pagan 
times, one of the rare previsions of Christianity 
which made the early Christian fathers willing 
to count Plato almost with the best of the He- 
brew prophets. Hercules comes nearer to being 
a Christian than any other of the gods or demigods 
of classic antiquity, unless it be Prometheus, and 
Plato's parable would put him level with the 
patriarchs of Jewish story. But what Greek 
philosophy or ethics teaches occasionally and im- 
perfectly, Christianity formulates, as the rule of 
life, and most successfully persuades to this con- 
version. 

Love as law of life involves not only the be- 
ginning of the life of love in conversion, but it ac- 
complishes and rules that life in service. Religion 
is service. It is not dreaming, it is not com- 
munion with God; it is not anything merely pas- 
sive or receptive, beautiful as such mystic expe- 
rience may be. I do not mean to say that a youth 
in his years of preparation for service, or a man in 
his hours of rest from service, should not delectate 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 313 

himself in the thought of God's love for him, and 
his love for God; but it is the ebullition of loving 
service, and not the fomentation of spiritual 
caloric for the enjoyment of its warmth, not the 
holding of the hands up to the divine flame for 
the sake of its heat ; nor is it even the communion 
of prayer that is the chief fruit of love. The love 
of Christ constraineth us. The beggar in the 
German story, who asked of Peter at the door of 
heaven that he might only have a seat just in- 
side the gate, where he might ever look in the 
face of the blessed Lord, wished what might be 
expected of a suffering, weary beggar. But it 
was a truer conception of life for this world and 
the next which said:* 

"His state 
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed, 
And past o'er land and ocean without rest. 
They also serve who only stand and wait." 

They serve while waiting the next orders of service. 
This makes Christianity a missionary religion. 
It is bound to do its best for the world. It will 
not only teach this world what is true, but its 
first purpose is to make the world good, to do 
it good in every possible way. Mohammedanism 
and Buddhism have been missionary religions, 
but neither of them has tried to convert the world 
because it loved the world. The followers of 
Mohammed wished dominion for their faith, and 
there was little love in the choice given, of the 



3H WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

Koran or the sword; and the Buddhist ideal was 
not that of service, but of blessed absorption in 
the ocean of God. 

We have considered Christianity as a religion, 
which has to do with duty, and so as a sec- 
tion of ethics, but which has brought ethics to 
the understanding of itself, and has taught it 
its own central law of love. We now will con- 
sider Christianity as a philosophy, that is, its 
theology. 

But this is the smaller part of our study of the 
essence of Christianity. Christ and Paul put love, 
duty, and religion before philosophy or theology. 
And as it is the smaller, so it is also the harder 
part of our study of Christianity. We recall that 
it was harder to get a central, unifying principle 
of truth, which is what philosophy has to deal 
with, than it was to find such a unifying principle 
for duty. 

But Christianity being a religion of duty, rather 
than of truth, its philosophy centres on the same 
principle as does its religion, namely, on love, 
while branching out into other realms of truth. 

(i) Christianity believes in one God, whose 
primary quality is love. Judaism had discovered 
the oneness of God, and his natural attributes, 
his power and his wisdom, or even his rmral at- 
tributes of justice and holiness ; but it had not dis- 
covered love as his convincing quality. It made 
him a ' ' jealous God, ' ' a national God. Christia rr ty 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 315 

makes him the Father of all creatures which he 
has made. Its prayer to God is to "Our Father." 
It makes him the Father not of a family or a race, 
but of all men. It gives God no choice of loving. 
He must love. It is his essential nature. It is 
binding on God, just as it is binding on us, only 
infinitely more so. 

(2) Christianity puts every man under obliga- 
tion to love; and this means individual responsi- 
bility, with all its corollaries of free will, and all 
the equal obligation of service to be given and 
received; which implies the democratic unity or 
equality of the race. "Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself/ ' This gives us the lesson of the 
brotherhood of man. If God is "our Father/ • 
then all are one. 

And all brethren having equal responsibility for 
love and service, each soul must be regenerated 
for itself. There is no salvation by wholesale, by 
races, by birth. The soul that sinneth it shall 
die, and the soul that repenteth shall live. But 
this conversion, this acceptance of the law of 
love, must come in some way, whether by educa- 
tion or catastrophe is not essential. It may come 
in sudden wise, under an overwhelming view of 
the evil of sin, and the love of Christ, or it may 
be thdPflu 

"Through no disturbance of my soul, 
Or strong compunction in me wrought 
• irtw I supplicate for thy control, 

But in the quietude of thought." 



3 i6 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

How it comes is not essential; but that repen- 
tance come some way is imperative, both as reli- 
gion and as theology. 

(3) Closely connected with this principle is 
the further teaching that Christianity must be 
a spiritual and not a formal ceremonial religion. 
As it is not national, but individual, so it is not 
priestly but spiritual. It accepts God as a spirit, 
who must therefore be worshipped in spirit and in 
truth. Christianity may use days, places, and 
rites, but they are no part of essential Christianity. 
Christianity finds use for the Sabbath, but the 
Sabbath is not a part of Christianity. Christianity 
honors the church, but can exist without the 
church. Christianity has two or more sacraments, 
but can dispense with all of them, and still be 
good Christianity, for Christianity is not a body 
but a spirit, and that spirit is love. 

(4) Christianity teaches a future life. This 
doctrine is not peculiar to Christianity, and does 
not grow out of love. A person might believe in 
annihilation, and yet be a very good Christian. 
But the doctrine of the future life is of great im- 
portance to Christianity, for comfort and for im- 
pulse and inspiration, and it is supported by the 
resurrection of our Lord. 

(5) Christianity gets its name from Christ, as 
one sent from God. Therefore Christianity teaches 
discipleship of Christ, who brought to man all 
this doctrine of love. Of course, therefore, Christi- 
anity teaches biographical facts about Christ; 



THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 317 

but we must distinguish the important from the 
non-important. It is interesting, but not im- 
portant, that he came as a child. Paul never 
speaks of the virgin birth, perhaps never heard 
of it, as the Gospels had not been written in his 
time. Christ's miracles are interesting, and throw 
much light on his character, but they have not 
the importance of his teachings. Those teach- 
ings must be equally valuable if Jesus had per- 
formed no miracles or had come to the earth as 
others come, or had come full grown. These bio- 
graphical facts, however interesting and however 
important, are not essential to the substance of 
Christianity. 

(6) Christ died on the cross. This is a very 
important fact and very useful to Christianity, 
and yet Christianity would exist if Christ had 
died as others die. God would still have been a 
loving Father, and could have forgiven just the 
same. We are not to look on the death of Christ 
as propitiating the Father, who needs nobody to 
excite or encourage his love. No expiating sac- 
rifice is needed, for God is abundantly able to 
forgive, out of his own store of love. Christ's 
death is the crown of his life and teaching, proves 
his genuineness, and is a power to draw us unto 
a life like his. 

(7) Christ's resurrection is of even more im- 
portance, because on it is based a considerable 
part of our faith in the future life; and it was of 



318 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

even greater importance, for this reason, to the 
early church. A belief in a future life of blessed- 
ness for the good, and in which persistent wrong 
will suffer retribution, is of no little help, espe- 
cially in the beginning of a life of self-sacrificing 
love, for in it self-love adds its aid to disinterested 
love; but a belief in the future life, and so in 
Christ's resurrection, is not absolutely essential to 
Christian character, which, as we have seen, is 
the really essential thing in Christianity; for 
only the life of love is essential. 

(8) Primitive Christianity taught that Jesus 
was the expected Messiah, sent not only to be 
the revealer of God, but his representative as 
King in the kingdom of God, and that he would 
return speedily to reign. But he did not thus 
return as he was expected. We understand the 
kingdom of God better now, and we make it a 
spiritual kingdom. But Christianity equally be- 
lieves, in this present day, in its coming supremacy 
in the world, and works for it. This is one of the 
respects in which modern Christianity has im- 
proved on primitive Christianity. 

(9) Early Christianity was satisfied to make 
Jesus the Christ, the expected Messiah who should 
make all things right. Very soon they began to 
philosophize about their Lord ; and following that 
familiar philosophy which separated and objecti- 
fied attributes, as in the Book of Proverbs the 
wisdom of God is spoken of as a separate per- 






THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 319 

sonified existence, and as in the prevalent Greek 
philosophy of Plato and Philo the "idea," or 
the " pattern/ ' of the Book of Hebrews was 
made to have a separate existence from its phys- 
ical embodiment, so the early Christians identi- 
fied the wisdom of God, his creative Logos, with 
Jesus, and held that this attribute had a sep- 
arate pre-existence and "was made flesh' ' in the 
person of the Christ. Out of this grew most 
naturally a doctrine of the Trinity, the indwelling 
Spirit of God being added to the Word of God. 
But a doctrine of the inner constitution of the 
Godhead is not and cannot be essential to Chris- 
tianity, for it is something on which we can have no 
knowledge. One may equal three, and three equal 
one, in heavenly or transcendental mathemat- 
ics, but this is quite beyond our understanding 
or possible research. The doctrine of the Trinity 
is not essential, because it has nothing to do with 
love. We do not even know whether it is true. 
But we do know that the damnatory clauses of the 
Athanasian creed on this subject are false, be- 
cause they directly contradict the supremacy of 
love in the realm of God. Christianity claims for 
Christ that in him dwelt the fulness of God; so 
far as we can see, as he is described to us, as his 
teachings have come to us, all of God that he 
could hold was in him. He taught God, because 
he felt and held the love of God as no other man 
had ever done or had approached doing. 



3 2o WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

But the essential thing is not the person of 
Christ, not even the death of Christ, but the 
teachings of Christ. It is in these that his divinity 
inheres. And they are divine not because he 
taught them, but because they are true; and the 
whole of it is love. Whoever gets this love, and 
however he gets it, is an essential Christian, no 
matter how many false beliefs he has about Christ, 
and no matter if he never heard of Christ, and 
calls himself a Jew or a Moslem, or is a wor- 
shipper of a million gods, as Christians believe in 
a million angels and devils. 

Yet remember the primacy of Christianity, be- 
cause love and life and truth came through Jesus 
Christ. Buddhism does not teach this doctrine, 
nor did Plato or Cicero. Socrates, the best of 
them all, gadfly of the state, ends his life with 
a cock to Esculapius. The advent of Christianity 
is the marvel and the flower of both philosophy 
and religion. It was the awakening of both 
religion and philosophy to a consciousness of 
themselves. That man only is a Christian who 
makes love the inner principle and the outflowing 
current of his life, and thereby chooses to be made 
a disciple of Christ. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 

THE sum of the whole matter is this : Reason 
is the last arbiter; our own reason, our in- 
dividual reason, my reason, nobody else's. 
There are various sources of authority, Bible, or 
church, or God, but each one must be tested by 
our personal reason before it is believed. We 
are all of us at bottom pure rationalists, cannot 
help being. What God is, whether there be a 
God, we must decide by the best reason we have. 
If we are made in the image of God that image 
is in reason, not in body; and our little reason 
can and must get some true view of God, just 
as our little, blinking, myopic eyes can truly, if 
imperfectly, descry the infinite spangled universe. 
Reason may see faintly, even erringly, but it is 
all we have to guide us. It may rest on custom, 
tradition, social inheritance, the teachings from 
childhood of those whom we think possessed of 
more knowledge and judgment than we, but all 
our beliefs rest on such reason as we have. 

We may travel beyond our reason; we may 
imagine, or guess, or wish, but on these we can 
never rest. Poets, to tell a pretty story or point 

321 



322 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

a lesson, have invented lovely or strange tales of 
gods and goddesses, and what they have told as 
story whole nations have taken as verities coming 
from the fathers who had better vision, and made 
a religion of them, and their children have be- 
lieved them true, until wiser men have torn away 
the pomp and gold of gay religions and have 
found the true God enshrouded there, and have 
worshipped him with Platonist adoration, or 
they have found only a stock of wood under the 
gilded veneer and have burned the wooden sham 
of their faith. It is reason that has made them 
find faith under the false finery, or reason that 
has made them despair. It is by reason that we 
too must test the Bible as well as the Vedas, 
Moses as well as Hesiod or Zarathustra. If we 
find in our Bible anything of cosmogony or his- 
tory or morals that does not approve itself to 
our reason, we must reject it; we cannot help it. 
That did not, could not, come direct from God, 
but came through fallible men, the framework and 
the cord of whose harp were constructed after the 
fashion of their day, and could not sound perfect 
music. Reason prefers our school text-book to 
our Bible on matters of geology and astronomy, 
sifts Bible history by comparison with contem- 
porary records recovered from the sands and 
clay of ancient empires; and reason it is that 
judges the teachings of Jesus to be superior to the 
sacrificial cult of Leviticus, or the cursings of 



SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 323 

Ezekiel and Amos. Our light is better than theirs, 
for our reason has more knowledge, more experi- 
ence, on which to rest. 

The best human reason — I think I do not err — 
whether it looks outward or inward, finds God. 
He is in nature about us; he is in the reason 
within us. It is not simply that we wish to find 
God, but we find him whether we wish it or not. 
Because things are, therefore something always 
was, self-existent, existing from the necessity of 
its own being; something, matter or mind, or 
both, filling the vacuity of space, out of infinite 
ether creating finite atoms and worlds, doing it 
purposely, intelligently, with infinite power and 
boundless wisdom. We find evidence — we can 
hardly be mistaken — not only of creative power 
but of constant anticipative foresight, looking for- 
ward through processes of development to the 
higher and highest forms of life and intelligence, 
to man; as if there were a Superior, a Supreme 
Power which guided the created world. So, in 
the beginning God; and so God through all the 
processes of creative evolution; a God not only 
boundless in might and wisdom, but boundlessly 
good, his laws imposed on man as good as they 
are wise, as beneficent as they are stern. 

To err about the laws of nature or of God is 
unfortunate, and may be calamitous; to disobey 
them wilfully is wrong. Our fallible reason may 
err as to these laws, or as to facts of profane or 



3 2 4 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

sacred history, but if one's belief is based, though 
wrong, on the evidence accessible to him, it is 
only of secondary importance to him, because the 
error is intellectual and does not affect his moral 
character; and moral excellence or obliquity is 
infinitely more important than lightness or wrong- 
ness of mere belief. Character before God or man 
depends not at all upon what we believe, but 
upon what we do. If Abraham believed God com- 
manded him to slay his son as a sacrifice, his at- 
tempt to do it was an act of supreme virtue ; but 
he was in error, for it is impossible that a good 
God could have commanded it. It is not su- 
premely important, however desirable, that any 
single one of our beliefs in religion should be cor- 
rect, not even our belief in God; but if we try 
to live up to the rule of duty, which is love, we 
shall be acceptable to God whether we know any- 
thing about him or not; and we shall not be ac- 
ceptable to him, no matter how correct our knowl- 
edge of him, if love be wanting. Theology may 
be the queen of sciences, but it is all a matter of 
opinion or belief based on evidence, as to the value 
and bearing of which good men may differ. It is 
a noble study, worth giving one's best thought to, 
but the enforcement upon one's soul of the obliga- 
tion of duty until it is natural to do right and im- 
possible to do wrong — here is task, here is primacy. 
For the most important of our beliefs, if not 
absolutely essential, is our common belief in God, 



SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 325 

which involves belief in the immortal soul and 
the future life. This allows hope and impresses 
duty to live such a life of goodness as will make 
the transition happy into the future life. 

Yet, as it appears to me, our purpose and aim 
should be to love and cultivate goodness for its 
own sake, because it is good, rather than because 
it will secure happiness and avoid misery in the 
future life. In the answer to the first question 
in the Assembly's Shorter Catechism, "man's 
chief end" may be "to glorify God," but it is 
hardly "to enjoy him forever"; however, that 
may be the result. To glorify God is very nearly 
the same thing as to magnify goodness, for God 
is infinite goodness. That is his ruling quality. 
To be utterly, totally good, loving, helpful, self- 
sacrificing, good as the holy God is good, to do 
justly, to love mercy, this is to walk humbly be- 
fore God, and this is "man's chief end," and has 
the promise of the life that now is and of that to 
come. 

I cannot quite agree with those who talk much 
of "coming back to Christ" as if it were a new 
discovery of the age. It is well to find in Christ 
a revelation of God, also inestimable, teaching 
and ex,ample. But God is primary, not Jesus, 
as Paul himself would teach us, when he says that 
in the end Christ will give up the kingdom to the 
Father. God is quite as loving as Jesus. He 
holds no anger to be appeased. His fatherly love 



326 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

can hardly need any sacrifice to remove his anger. 
His attitude to us is that of a father, not of a 
jealous judge who rules under law which infallibly 
exacts penalty for every offense. I cannot but 
believe that modern theology has made too much 
of the Atonement, much more than the Bible 
makes of it under the figures either of sacrifice 
or redemption. With Paul the great thing was 
the resurrection, more than the Atonement. He 
makes much, to be sure, of the Atonement, that 
is, Christ's death for us, but it is always huper, 
for, in our behalf, not anti, instead of, in sub- 
stitution. We know certainly, beyond historic 
doubt, that Jesus has revealed to us God, our 
Father, and the rule of life in the spirit, not in 
any forms or rituals, and the eternal life; also 
that his teaching of God and duty has been of 
mighty saving influences; and that is enough; 
and if there be more in the counsels of God that 
made his death especially important, because 
otherwise "die he or justice must/' in "rigid 
satisfaction, death for death," this we may prop- 
erly leave in the counsels of God, who only knows 
where our merits and our frailties in equal trust 
repose, the bosom of our Father and our God. 

There are those who will see a religious danger 
in the slipping away from the former views as 
to the supreme authority of the written Word of 
God. There is such danger. There are those 
who will conclude that if the outposts of faith 



SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 327 

are withdrawn the whole fortress is lost. Their 
alarm we cannot help. If they have had the es- 
sence of Christianity, the love of God and man, 
their own faith will not perish. I think a clearer 
understanding of what Christianity really is, 
and the removal of its dubious theological de- 
fenses added to the simple gospel, as the Jews 
11 fenced' ' the Law, will help not a few to choose 
the Christian life. And at any rate we ought not 
to hesitate to seek and proclaim what our best 
study believes to be true, out of any fear that 
the result will endanger our faith or that of others. 
Truth will prevail, and truth will be safe. 

I find in the Old Testament, and therefore 
where I would not expect it, the clearest, the 
most philosophical, explanation of the transition 
by which the man who has sinned passes into the 
divine life. In vision Isaiah saw Jehovah on his 
throne, and he heard the seraphim about the 
throne cry, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of 
hosts." That is, being interpreted, he was over- 
whelmed by the thought of the infinite sanctity 
of God, in whom holiness is supreme over every 
other attribute. He had a view of how beautiful 
and how awful goodness is, and of the God who 
loves and will support and crown goodness, and 
who hates and will oppose and crush wrong. 
The effect on him of this vision of the holy God 
was to make Isaiah look inward on himself and 
see his own failure to meet the faultless glory of 



328 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

such holiness, and he cried, "Woe is me, for I am 
undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I 
dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips ; for 
mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts." 
That, being interpreted, is that a serious considera- 
tion of the infinite beauty and majesty of the 
goodness of God stirs the self-convicted soul to 
confess and repent of its sins, for "the goodness 
of God leadeth to repentance." So repentance is 
the second stage in the experience of conversion. 
The vision of Isaiah continues: "Then flew one 
of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in 
his hand which he had taken with the tongs from 
off the altar, and he laid it upon my mouth, say- 
ing, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine 
iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.'" 
This third step follows and must follow, if God 
is good, the pardoning word heard and joyfully 
accepted. This we call faith, faith in the present 
and instant love and forgiveness of God. The 
Old Testament speaks of the coal from the altar 
of sacrifice, but the New Testament says that 
"the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us 
from all sin"; yet it is all faith in God's mercy, 
through which we, as well as the elders, obtain 
a good report. But this third step does not con- 
clude the vision or the experience of the forgiven 
soul; for the prophet continues: "And I heard 
a voice saying, Whom shall I send and who will 
go for us ? Then said I, Here am I ; Lord, send 



SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 329 

me." The soul that has a convincing sense of 
the splendor of the spotless goodness of God, 
that has then repented of sin, and then has the 
assurance of faith in the forgiveness and love of 
God, cannot fail to hear God's call and the cry 
of a suffering and erring world for help on errands 
of mercy. He will give himself to fellow-service 
with Christ; and this is the final and completing 
stage in the process of conversion, what we call 
consecration, which is love regnant if not yet 
perfected in the soul, love sacrificial and con- 
queror over life or death, the fairest word, whether 
for man or angel, in the bright lexicon of Chris- 
tian life. 

I have used the word conversion, a word not 
soon to go out of use. It designates the critical 
experience which every one must have possessed 
who would live a worthy life. It has all these 
elements of religious experience, the vision of the 
beauty of goodness, sorrow for the wrong that 
has been done, assurance of the loving mercy of 
God, and the will to live the life which goodness 
and the God of Goodness require. One need not 
know when the will so to live becomes first con- 
scious; it may have grown in the child through 
his earliest education, or it may have come later 
through a deep conflict and convulsion of the 
soul; but at some time it must begin to rule the 
man. One element or another may predominate 
in the experience, perhaps an overwhelming con- 



^ 



330 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

viction of sin, with a sudden light driving away 
the gloom; or it may be that a sense of the love 
of God in Jesus Christ will so flood the soul that 
faith is swallowed up in victory; or it may be 
that a serious and yet passionless resolve may 
settle quietly on the soul to live a worthy and 
useful life — whatever the form of the experience 
may be it will finally settle into the conscious 
determination to the love and service of Being in 
General, that is, to God and man. And such a 
will, shown in life, is the crown of life, whether it 
appears under the Christian dispensation, or the 
older Jewish, or blossoms in the less favored soil 
of some pagan faith or some dubitant philosophy. 
Why do not preachers and Sunday-school 
teachers understand how to make it clear to their 
hearers or their scholars just what it is thus to 
become a Christian? It is the most important 
thing to be taught in a Bible school or a theological 
seminary ; but I do not think that I was properly 
taught it. My experience was that of many, I 
believe, who have been told they ought to be- 
come Christians, and who wish it, but who have 
not been told just exactly, in plain terms, what 
they must do about it. They get the idea that 
they must wait till it comes; or when they have 
asked, "What must I do to be saved ?" they have 
heard the blind answer, "Believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.' ' But what 
is it, they have asked, to believe on the Lord 



SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 331 

Jesus, and how shall I go about it ? I think that 
answer about the most unintelligible that can be 
given in these days. It had a more definite 
meaning when Paul said it. 

I remember how the importance of having a 
clear answer to that question was first impressed 
upon me. It was in the first year after my gradu- 
ation from the theological seminary that, shortly 
before the opening of the Civil War, I had charge 
of two churches in the troubled State of Kansas. 
The whole population of the village where I 
lived was employed in cutting lumber from the 
neighboring Indian reserve. One day the older 
Methodist minister and myself were suddenly 
called to visit a man who had been hurt by the 
falling of a tree and had but a few hours to live. 
He was presumably of the reckless, profane class, 
but yet no unbeliever, and desperately wanted to 
make his peace with God during the very brief 
remaining period of probation. The older minister 
talked and prayed with him, but it did not seem 
to me that he had given any clear instruction. 
Then it came my turn, and the best I knew I 
said, but I went away sad at heart, for I felt that 
I had not said that something that ought to have 
been said. 

What should be said? That, I think, which 
should be said to a little innocent child that 
knows very little of sin, and that same which 
should be said to the experienced man of this 



332 WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY 

selfish world. The child should be told that 
God is good, that God loves good children, that 
God will love him if he is good, that Jesus was 
good and loved little children, and that he died 
to help them be good and go to heaven ; and then 
the child should be urged and persuaded — and 
the persuasion will not be difficult — to promise 
before God that he will try as long as he lives to 
be good, to please God, for God will love him and 
help him. That is all that is essential, but it 
must be followed up, that the purpose may not 
be forgotten, and that goodness may grow into 
a habit. That is all that is needed for the older 
people that they may be converted and become 
as little children. I should have told that lum- 
berman — I hope I did substantially if imperfectly 
— that he knew, and God knew, that he had not 
lived a good and pure life, but that God is not 
resentful but very merciful and forgiving; and 
that before he went to meet his God he should 
follow me in a prayer of repentance and in the 
pledge before God that if his life were preserved, 
or in the brief fraction of it left, he would forsake 
sin and live in such a way as would please God, 
and that if he did this earnestly, he might now 
die happy in the faith that the Heavenly Father 
who loves the returning prodigal will forgive him 
and receive him even as the penitent thief was 
received into Paradise. 

That is all I know. It is the simple gospel of 



SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 333 

Jesus Christ as he taught it to sinful men and 
women who heard him gladly. And I believe 
that such faithful teaching to our children will 
give us purer and more intelligent Christians than 
will be gathered in by the excitement of septennial 
revivals. The revival is not bad when needed, 
but how much better that quietness of thought 
which offers the prayer: 

"Oh give to me, made lowly wise 
The spirit of self-sacrifice; 
The confidence of reason give, 
And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live. ,, 



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